X-Rays in Tallaght hospital

S

Sunny

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Serious how does something like this happen? I can understand workload pressures etc for a certain backlog but to allow the backlog to get to over 50,000 x-rays before it is noticed and acted upon is negligence of the highest possible order.
Let me guess how this play out. The hospital and unions will blame funding cutbacks, the HSE will blame local management in the hospital, Mary Harney will announce that it is an issue for the HSE and has nothing to do with her as Minister Of Health, FG will call for her resignation, Brian Cowan will express full confidence in her and on and on and on and on........
 
Sounds about right. And meanwhile employees of the HSE will harrumph and insist they are hard done by and escalate their action and do even less and nobody will do anything about it...
 
I look at this from a process perspective; either there was a procedure in place in which case the person who didn’t follow it is to blame (and should be sacked) or there was no procedure in place in which case the person who should have put it in place should be sacked. If nobody was tasked with making sure a procedure was in place then the medical director should be sacked.

Do these places not get audited by the Irish Medicines board? If not what level of certification do they have and who is their regulatory body? Do the HSE conduct audits?

One person is dead and another had a very delayed diagnosis which may cause them their life. The book had to stop with someone (and blaming the minister or lack of funding is just a cop-out) and that person should, at the very least, lose their job. In theory more than one person should face the music but in practice it just ‘aint gonna happen.
 
sack someone - come on - that just doesn't happen in HSE.

But we just accept that standard as a nation.
 
Someone, somewhere, didn't do their job, for a very long time.

And a number of others were complicit in faciliating this person (or persons) in not doing thier job.

Nothing to do with lack of funding or excessive workloads. Just an I can't be arsed attitude.
 
Purple said:
... Do these places not get audited by the Irish Medicines board? ... .
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IMB has no role to play in monitoring clinical practice in hospitals or in auditing diagnostic procedures.

The DOH&C is supposed to set policy and standards - they have > 560 expensive employees to do this and this number has not reduced significantly since the HSE was invented, but I'm not sure what role DOH&C is supposed to play in monitoring compliance with standards.

Various internal enquiries will probably me initiated by various self-serving self-regulating professional bodies, but don't expect anyone to be found responsible or accountable, but health services' clients will continue to suffer.

In the meantime these two outfits have some role to play in standards assessment.

[broken link removed]

http://www.hiqa.ie/
 

We're just a small business but we get audited by the NSAI (twice a year) and are subject to audits from the IMB and the US Food and Drug Administration. We also get about 5-8 customer audits a year and conduct 18 internal audits a year.
I find it hard to believe that hospitals don't get audited by any outside body.
 

And it will be a Lesson Learned with another dust-gathering report behind it
 

It's called HIQA! I cant understand how this happened. Standard, is review and written reports of Radiology scans. Reports are sent to consultants and in their charts. So, there's alot more than one person culpible here! This came to light in December - what happened between December and Now. Cases got reviewed but why werent those caseloads advised of this. What did Mary Harney do when she was told of this the day after Prof. Conlon was appointed. There has been systematic failures in diagnosis from Portlaoise to Rebecca O'Malley. Mary Harney said these kind of failures wouldnt happen with the new centres of excellence. Obviously, that's untrue. Risk management systems I wonder what those were. And I wonder was the fact that patients were not advised and this was not brought into the public domain part of risk management ie. State Claims! Oh yes, and Harney is in New Zealand. Maybe, she's looking at that health service.
 
There could well be plenty that Mary Harney did or didn't do - but she doesn't work there.

Either someone who physically works there or who has immediate responsibility for those who work there, is to blame.

Blaming MH is like blaming John Gormley for illegal dumping.
 
I have zero faith in Tallaght hospitals procedures.

I was once referred there by my GP for an ENT appointment. Months passed and no appointment notification, when I phoned I was told there was a backlog and it would be addressed shortly. It was suggested twice that I get my GP to send another letter.
Finally, after about a year I spoke to someone who admitted to me on the phone that no one was addressing ENT referral letters and that there were shelves of them growing dusty and she personally advised I get my GP to refer me elsewhere. She said (and I quote), 'the whole system here is a mess, no one is bothering to address anything''.

More than 3 years later I received a letter from ENT stating that if I still wanted the appointment that the referral letter was about (3 years and a few months between referral letter date and appointment letter date) to phone them, otherwise they would assume I had no more need for it.

More than 3 years. I kid you not. And the only communication during that time was from ME phoning to know what was going on.

The health service is a shambles.
 
Chronology HIQA told in APRIL 2009 and then in January HIQA was informed of the total numbers involved!
 
annet said:
... Cases got reviewed but why werent those caseloads advised of this. ...
Click to expand...
Here is a big part of the problem. Clients of health service organisations are not people any more, they are merely cases or files, and health services no longer deal with people but manage caseloads. Illnesses and conditions are treated, but not people.

Apparently a unit's degree of "busy-ness" or importance is measured by the size of their caseload (the number of files in a cabinet) and the length of the queue awaiting the services they provide, rather than the number of individuals they are actually helping.

I was stunned recently when my grandson Jack was being admitted to modern private hospital on a consultant referral. My daughter went to park her car leaving me with Jack in reception, where we were approached by a staff-member and greeted as follows "Ah, are you the [name of the condition Jack was to be treated for]?" Jack wasn't thought of as a child or as a person, he was merely a revenue-generating condition; a cow in a dairy-herd would not be referred to in such demeaning terms.

I also attended a specialist in the recent past and I was greeted with "Are you Dr. Murphy's 11:00 o'clock appointment?" Yet again here was a client being depersonalised, dehumanised even to the point of just being a time-slot on someone's appointment's diary, with a revenue tag attached.

I naievely thought this sort of thinking had died out with the "Carry On..." films, but apparently it persists in our modern 21st century health system and until we can change how the people working in the heath services think of their clients, their behaviour towards them will not change.
 
Purple said:
What's HIQA?
Click to expand...

The Health Information Quality Authority which is another public quango that is suppose to be charged with regulating standards in public hospitals. But ironically, that is minus services for persons with intellectual disabilities and our private hospitals. I am not up on whether psychiatric hospitals or social services (children) come under its remit yet but doubt it. Private clinics for cosmetic surgery also are outside its remit AFAIK.
 


You'd want to be around for ward handovers, persons were regularly not referred to by their names but identified by their conditions TURP in bed 10, or the CABG in bed 4! I returned to Ireland in the 1990's and in one Dublin hospital they were only introducing things like primary nursing and care plans in the late 1990's....like they were new innovations in practice.... "carry on" is an understatement.
 
annet said:
Chronology HIQA told in APRIL 2009 and then in January HIQA was informed of the total numbers involved!
Click to expand...

They knew of 4,000 cases in April 2009.
Doesn't sound like Mary Harney was in a rush to find out how serious it was.

"Minister for Health Mary Harney, who is in New Zealand, said today that while she had first learnt of the issue in December last, it was only yesterday that she became aware of the scale of the problem"


[broken link removed]
 
Did she not ask about the scale of the problem when she was first notified?
 
What other "problems" is she aware about...doesn't inspire confidence. Sounds more like a cover up operation gone wrong to me
 
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