Widow ‘outraged’ by footage of husband’s facial wound

The widow of a Co Meath nursing home resident who died in June said she is “outraged” after seeing video footage showing his facial wound infested with maggots after his transfer to hospital.

Mary Bartley-Meehan said she has just received medical records and video footage taken of the cancerous facial wounds on her late husband Ultan Meehan recorded by medics at a Dublin hospital after he was transferred from Kilbrew Nursing Home in Ashbourne, Co Meath.

It is the first time she saw video evidence of his condition on his admission to Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, west Dublin on May 29th. He died of sepsis on June 15th.

Medics found Mr Meehan, who suffered from dementia and terminal cancer, had scratched his facial tumours into an open wound. Hospital medical records said that Kilbrew Nursing Home was “unable to manage” the wound on his face and it had become infested.

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Medical records

"I am more than sickened. I am, pure and simply, outraged," the Co Meath woman said in a letter to the editor of The Irish Times after receiving the medical records and viewing the video.

She said she was also outraged that despite reports to health watchdog Hiqa, the Health Service Executive and a letter to two ministers for health, she has had “no formal contact” suggesting that “the disturbing circumstances surrounding my husband’s death will be independently reviewed or investigated”.

Ms Bartley-Meehan said she felt like she was “a parcel being passed” between Hiqa, the department and the HSE.

“I do not have the resources or indeed the heart to go down a legal route at this stage. I just know that what happened was terribly wrong and that it is nothing short of a scandal that there seems to be no means available to the State to review the treatment my husband received in a private nursing home,” she wrote in her letter.

Private nursing home

Sage Advocacy, a support group for vulnerable adults, escalated four “notices of concern” about the treatment of Mr Meehan from April to June. It has criticised the absence of a State mechanism to investigate the care of a resident in a privately run nursing home.

Mervyn Taylor, director of Sage, said Ms Bartley-Meehan was told Hiqa had carried out an inspection of the nursing home but he said the regulator did not have authority to investigate the treatment of her husband and there was currently no investigation into what happened to him.

Kilbrew chief executive James Keeling said last month the nursing home worked to provide “the best of care to every resident” and that, like other homes, it was “under acute pressure in the midst of the pandemic”.