Locum consultant guilty of misconduct

A LOCUM consultant pathologist who was at the centre of a controversy in 2007 after wrongly reporting a woman’s breast biopsy as benign when it was malignant was found guilty of professional misconduct by a Medical Council fitness-to-practise hearing yesterday.

The committee did not recommend that Dr Antoine Geagea (59) be struck off the register. It recommended that he would be censured by the Medical Council and that six conditions would be attached to retain his name on the medical register.

These conditions included not carrying out non-gynaecological cytology unless supervised; setting up a professional development plan to familiarise himself with histopathology and non-gynaecological cytology, and not practising medicine until doctors provided a fitness-to-practise medical report.

The committee’s recommendations will next go before the Medical Council for consideration.

Dr Geagea was employed as a locum at University Hospital Galway from September 2006 to March 2007.

The hearing was sparked by the case of a woman referred to as Ms A who attended Barrington’s private hospital in Limerick, which sent biopsies to the hospital.

Her breast cancer was misdiagnosed on two occasions, once by Dr Geagea in March 2007. When the woman’s third biopsy was sent to a hospital in Cork in 2007, the errors came to light.

This resulted in a review of pathology services at University Hospital Galway by the Health Information and Quality Authority, which found 50 errors in a review of Dr Geagea’s work. The authority subsequently made a complaint about Dr Geagea to the Medical Council.

The committee found that it was proved as fact that Dr Geagea erred on one or more of 49 cases identified by the authority, as well as the Ms A case.

The misdiagnoses fell seriously short of the standard of conduct expected and the error rate was not acceptable, the committee found.

Prof Elaine Kay, pathologist at Beaumont Hospital, told the hearing that in a blind review of slides she found that errors were made in 39 of the 50 cases identified by the quality authority.

The standard of reporting by Dr Geagea “did not meet the benchmark”, there were “too many mistakes” and wording used in some results did not make sense, she said. If he was a trainee she would be thinking that he had “a lot of work to do to get to exam level”, she said.