A REGISTRAR who worked with a Drogheda-based consultant who is facing 38 allegations of professional misconduct has said the consultant never told her to order a biopsy for a woman who later died of cancer.
Dr Rukhsana Majeed, who worked with consultant gynaecologist Dr Etop Samson Akpan at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda in 2008, denied she had been instructed to follow up on the case of Sharon McEneaney.
Ms McEneaney from Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, had a cancerous tumour in her abdomen and died, aged 31, in April 2009 after delays in her treatment at the hospital. She first attended Our Lady of Lourdes in October 2007, but she was not treated for cancer until July 2008 and only had a biopsy after the intervention of former TD Dr Rory O’Hanlon in late June 2008. Dr Akpan has been accused of professional misconduct in her case.
Yesterday, Eileen Barrington SC, for Dr Akpan, told a fitness-to-practise inquiry that her client would say he left a note for Dr Majeed on Ms McEneaney’s file in February 2008. This instructed her to arrange a CT scan-guided biopsy for Ms McEneaney. He would say he was going on holiday and he left the chart with the note on his secretary’s desk to be passed on to Dr Majeed.
He would claim the registrar mistakenly ordered an ultrasound instead of the biopsy and it was carried out in April. When he returned from his holiday Ms McEneaney was no longer on his clinic list, Ms Barrington said.
Dr Majeed told the hearing the first she heard of the case was during an investigation into it in late 2009. She never saw Ms McEneaney as an inpatient or an outpatient and no one discussed the case with her. She also would have recalled having to order such a biopsy as they were rare at the hospital. “I never came across any note like that as far as I recall,” she said. “I was never, ever told about this patient.”
Also giving evidence yesterday, consultant radiologist Dr Deirdre Lynch said she reported on a CT scan on Ms McEneaney carried out in January 2008. She recommended a biopsy should be carried out and there should be further discussion on the case.
No biopsy was performed until July 2008, but an ultrasound scan was performed in April. Dr Lynch told the tribunal she believed that ultrasound was carried out on foot of a request made when Ms McEneaney was seen at the hospital in November 2007 and that it should have been cancelled.
The request had been prioritised as level two, which meant Ms McEneaney needed the ultrasound within two weeks, Dr Lynch said. At the time the waiting list for priority two was six months.
“Radiology is significantly understaffed – we have one sonographer when we really should have four or five,” she told the inquiry. She said this explained why Ms McEneaney had an ultrasound in April that was ordered in November. But Ms Barrington said the April ultrasound was carried out on foot of the mistake made by Dr Majeed, who ordered it instead of a biopsy. The hearing continues today.
