The Willis report on retained organs found that hospitals need to make improvements
THE SCANDAL over the retention of organs without consent following postmortem examination in Irish hospitals first emerged in 1999.
Heartbroken parents began to find out one by one when they made inquiries at individual hospitals, following a similar controversy in the UK, that the organs of their deceased infants had been retained and that they had buried loved ones without vital organs. Some described having buried “an empty shell”.
The campaign group Parents for Justice was formed and urged an inquiry be established. Anne Dunne SC was appointed to chair an inquiry by the then health minister Micheál Martin in 2000 and she found among other things that sand was used to make up the weight of deceased children after some of their organs were removed during postmortem examinations going back to the 1970s.
However, before Dunne produced a final report, her inquiry was wound up in early 2005, having already run up significant costs. Minister for Health Mary Harney appointed UCC law lecturer Deirdre Madden to examine the documentation which had already been collected and produce a report. She did so in January 2006. Her report recommended an independent audit of all organs still being retained by hospitals across the State. This audit by Michaela Willis, a former member of the Retained Organs Commission in the UK, was published yesterday, along with a separate investigation into practices at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital which was instigated after a visit by Willis to the hospital caused alarm bells to go off in 2007.
The Willis report found all hospitals are now seeking consent for organ retention and there are “a good number of hospitals with excellent documentation” but there is significant room for improvement in terms of training for mortuary staff, upgrading of mortuary facilities, and in tracking organs when removed. She condemned the practice of some hospitals incinerating organs up to 2007 and also drew attention to a number of worrying things which continue to happen.
In Cork University Hospital, for example, she found a suspected CJD organ was disposed of in error and another organ retained in its place. But while Madden’s report said lessons needed to be learned from the organ retention controversy, the reports published yesterday by the HSE make it clear lessons were not learned by all, most notably the Rotunda Hospital where more than 100 families were finding out for the first time yesterday that organs/tissue samples were retained either without consent or the consent they had given to retain them only for a year was not adhered to.
In two cases the consent to retain organs was obtained retrospectively; in nine cases parents had placed limitations on what could be retained at postmortem which were breached; and in the remainder consent had been given to retain organs for a specific period only, so consent had expired.
The hospital’s master, Dr Sam Coulter-Smith, acknowledged lessons had not been learned from previous reports and apologised. There had been a lack of oversight and management, he said, of postmortem practices at the hospital. It seems shocking this could have happened after all the controversy around postmortem practices in Irish hospitals. But as is often the case, the inquiry found that in terms of corporate or executive accountability no one individual appeared to be responsible for performance in this area in the hospital.
When the Madden report was published over three years ago, Harney promised to enact legislation, called for in her report, to ensure that in future organs would not be removed without the consent of the deceased’s next of kin. We are still waiting for it.