IN her testimony, Dr Joan Power, BTSB regional director in Cork, spoke of difficulties the board had in 1994 with the Department of Health. The difficulties arose when it came to financing emergency anti D related projects and the setting up a targeted "lookback" programme designed to trace recipients of infected antiD who had later donated blood.
She recalled that such a programme had been considered at the BTSB "from very early on". It was discussed at a medical subcommittee meeting on March 22nd 1994 and by the (anti D contamination) co ordinating committee that April. Her desire was to plan it, learning from the screening programme, which was "the first mass screening for hepatitis C in the world".
On September 13th 1994, she received a letter from Mr Frank Ahern at the Department of Health, seeking a comprehensive report on progress in the lookback programme "within two days". She prepared and sent it, but was later told the Department would fund a lookback programme only for those affected by anti D related infection. Dr Power had ethical problems with this and told the Department she was "not prepared to proceed with one half of a programme". She was asked to recost it and had done that by October.
She was critical of the "money is no object" statements emanating from the Department at the time. She recalled a view of the hepatitis C committee at the BTSB that "there must be value for money", when it was already quite clear what was needed.
She felt that administrative support was "not as it should be", alluding to the "archaic and bureaucratic" communications which "slowed things down" and the "burdensome bureaucratic layer" that was the hepatitis C coordinating committee. "A committee of 16 people, you can imagine what that was like," she remarked to Mr John Rogers SC. He reminded her that the Cabinet was made up of 16 people.
Dr Power said she and Dr Emer Lawlor, who were not on the coordinating committee, were organising the effort to deal with "this great human tragedy" which had also become "the biggest research project into hepatitis C going on in the world".
Dealing with a pronounced difference between herself, other haematologists at the BTSB, and a group of independent hepatologists (liver specialists), during the summer of 1994, she said she did not favour sending all women who were "RIBA reactive" (testing positive to an advanced hepatitis C test) to hospital. She believed it unnecessary to send those with lesser indications of contact with the virus. The hepatologists were strongly of the view that all such women should be referred to hospital.
