DR MAURICE Hayes is to chair the inquiry being set up by the HSE into the delayed reporting of X-rays and delayed opening of GP referral letters at Tallaght hospital, it was announced yesterday.
The terms of reference for the inquiry, to be chaired by the former independent senator who has worked for most of his life in the public service in Northern Ireland, will be published next week.
The HSE, in a statement, said he will be assisted by Patricia Gordon who is the director of the Multiple Sclerosis Society in Northern Ireland and former chief executive of the South and East Belfast Trust.
There will also be a GP, a patient advocate and a radiologist on the review team. These members have not yet been named.
Dr Hayes expects the review to report in about three months.
The review follows the revelation last week that some 57,921 adult X-rays had not been reported by consultant radiologists at Tallaght hospital between 2005 and the end of 2009. The hospital’s chief executive, Prof Kevin Conlon, said while the majority would have been reviewed by a non-radiologist, what occurred was “totally unacceptable” and arose from systemic and process failures.
The unreported X-rays are now being reviewed and to date two patients have been found to have had a delayed diagnosis. One of these patients has died.
It also emerged last week that thousands of GP referral letters sent to the hospital remained unprocessed last October. The review team will also examine how and why this was allowed to happen, though a report from the Comptroller Auditor General late last year found some clinics at the hospital stopped accepting referrals in order to get outpatient waiting lists under control.
Meanwhile, the HSE yesterday began a further audit to ensure no other hospitals have GP referral letters left unopened. The ones in Tallaght dated back to 2002.
In a letter to all hospitals, the director of the HSE’s serious incident management team, Anne Carrigy, asked them to “confirm you have no unopened letters to diagnostic or speciality services”.
In addition, she drew their attention to the national hospitals office code of practice for healthcare records management which sets out how referral letters should be dealt with. It states referral letters should be date stamped on receipt in every department, should be recorded on the appropriate system, assessed by appropriate healthcare professional and marked routine or urgent, and the patient referred to in the letter should be offered an appointment or put on a waiting list. It also states that the GP or other referral source should be notified of the outcome of the referral.
All hospitals have already been asked to confirm they have no X-rays that went unreported.