THE FAMILY of a woman who died five days after being admitted to Dublin’s St James’s Hospital have claimed there was “gross neglect” in her treatment.
The husband, daughter and brother of the late Colette Donohoe (54), from Crumlin, told a Medical Council fitness to practise inquiry yesterday that she was admitted to the hospital on August 17th, 2006, with stomach pains and vomiting. She deteriorated in the days that followed without receiving proper medical attention.
Ms Donohoe was admitted on a Thursday when an out-of-hours doctor suspected she had a “strangulated incisional hernia”. By Monday she was vomiting putrid brown liquid which looked like diarrhoea.
Jennifer Donohoe said a CT scan was ordered on her mother after she was admitted to hospital but it was not carried out until five days later, just hours before her mother died.
She lodged a complaint with the council about locum consultant surgeon Dr Javaid Ahmad Butt, under whose care her mother had been admitted. She said her mother had been in good health up to the time of her admission and her sudden death was devastating.
The family had many questions and had not received answers to them from the hospital.
Dr Butt was before the inquiry facing five allegations of professional misconduct, including failing to arrange adequate treatment for the patient’s bowel obstruction, failing to arrange adequate monitoring of her, failing to arrange timely surgical intervention and failing to keep adequate medical records. He denies the allegations.
In a letter to the council, he said Ms Donohoe was being managed conservatively rather than surgically, which was appropriate, and she was seen regularly.
A postmortem found she died of multi-organ failure, sepsis and severe infectious colitis.
The inquiry heard the scan was not carried out immediately because it was ordered as a “routine” scan.
The inquiry also heard there were no medical notes on Ms Donohoe’s chart between 8am on Friday and Monday afternoon, by which time she had told her brother, Noel Moran, she feared “she might be bunched”.
Noel Donohoe gave evidence that his wife deteriorated over the weekend of August 19th and 20th. On the evening of Monday, August 21st, he got a shock when he saw her.
“I knew by looking at her she was dying,” he said. He ran to the nurses’ station and told them to call a doctor, but a doctor did not come to see her until 4am the next morning.
The next day, August 22nd, he was called to the hospital as his wife had taken “a turn”. She was brought for a CT scan and transferred to intensive care. Dr Butt told him she was going to be taken to theatre for “routine” surgery and would be back doing light housework within weeks, but she was dead before surgery could get under way.
Mr Moran told the inquiry it was “blatantly obvious” to him his sister was extremely sick when he visited her on the Monday and “had deteriorated to an unbelievable level” since Saturday.
“She was clammy, her face was full of pain,” he recalled. She vomited brown material that smelt like diarrhoea twice while he was there. He did not bother the nurses as they were busy but now hugely regretted he did not go out “and scream and shout” to get help for her.
Prof David Bouchier Hayes, a retired surgeon called as an expert witness, said it was totally unacceptable that no records were kept over the weekend.
He told JP McDowell, for the council, it was “virtually impossible to justify” continuing with conservative treatment after the patient vomited five times on the Monday. “I think an opportunity was missed at that time.”
He said that “at the very least, this patient should have been offered surgery on the 21st”, the day before she died. By the time it was decided to proceed to surgery on August 22nd, the patient “was mortally ill and was unlikely to be salvaged by any intervention”.
He agreed with Conor Halpin, for Dr Butt, that it was reasonable to manage the woman conservatively for the first 72 hours.
Mr Halpin put it to him that Dr Butt could not be held responsible for his team not making medical records over the weekend.
Prof Bouchier Hayes insisted he was responsible for his team.
The inquiry continues on Monday.