REACTION:AN EMOTIONAL Rebecca O'Malley yesterday urged the Health Service Executive (HSE) to stop playing Russian roulette with the lives of patients.
Her comments followed the publication of the report into her breast cancer misdiagnosis which levelled severe criticism at the HSE and two public hospitals.
Ms O'Malley also took the opportunity to advise patients seeking breast-cancer treatment not to be afraid to ask questions to ensure they were getting the best care.The mother of three said she felt a mix of great sadness and anger looking at the inquiry's findings.
"After carefully studying the report, I feel achingly sad at the breadth and extent of the institutional deficiencies which let me and my family down so badly and exposed me to such grievous and continuing danger." She said she was shocked by the scale of failures outlined. Asked if people who made errors should have been named, she said it was never meant to be a witch-hunt.
"I'm not looking for heads on plates. I'm looking for lessons that can be learned."
She said the report showed surgeons had poked fine needles into patients' breasts for tissue samples without always having the assistance of ultrasounds to guide their hands; that those tissue samples were transported to a laboratory where the quality of work was never tested or measured; and often the samples sent were non-diagnosable because of deficiencies in the skills of the doctors taking them and inadequacies in the way the tissue slides were prepared.
"This is the dangerous system that I unwittingly stepped into in the company of many other patients with suspected breast cancer. A system that had been created and continued with no apparent safety checks.
"I became a victim of that patient-safety lottery, a perverse game of Russian roulette HSE-style. However, I did not play by the established rules of the game. I asserted myself and demanded answers to my reasonable questions. The system responded to my efforts by erecting, through ignorance or inertia, a wall of deafening silence that is so typical of the walls that patients regularly have to climb in an arduous effort to make the health system accountable to the very people it exists to serve."