A CORK-based GP told a pharmacist that she had issued prescriptions to patients because she feared for her safety after they had threatened to burn down her surgery, a fitness to practise committee of the Irish Medical Council heard yesterday.
Brendan Kelly told the hearing that he became concerned when a patient arrived at his pharmacy with a prescription for Rohypnol and Valium in August 2008. He wanted to verify that it was a genuine prescription issued by Dr Iwona Kulczyk so he rang her.
“I was concerned about the frequency of these prescriptions and she told me she had been threatened. She said she feared for the safety of herself and her secretary – they were the only two in the practice – and that she had been threatened that the surgery would be set on fire.”
Mr Kelly was one of 10 pharmacists who gave evidence yesterday at the fitness to practise committee hearing into allegations of overprescribing of benzodiazepines or tranquillisers by Dr Kulczyk to up to 86 patients at her surgery in Cork in 2008.
Opening the case for the Medical Council, barrister Patrick Leonard told the hearing that Dr Kulczyk obtained a medical degree in her native Poland in 1992 and qualified as a general practitioner in Poland in 1997.
Dr Kulczyk had applied for recognition as registered medical practitioner in Ireland in 2006 and had set up a practice at Penrose Wharf in Cork city, but she now worked in a practice in Midleton in east Cork, the hearing was told.
Mr Leonard said that the case arose from a complaint made to the Medical Council on November 10th, 2008, by Louise Creed, a community care pharmacist working with the Health Service Executive in Cork, who was concerned at the volume and pattern of prescribing by Dr Kulczyk.
Ms Creed had been contacted by 15 pharmacists in Cork city who were concerned at the number and type of prescriptions for benzodiazepines issued by Dr Kulczyk and presented by patients at their pharmacies across the city and suburbs.
Ms Creed had a meeting with Dr Kulczyk on September 26th, 2008, where she raised her concerns with her, but when the pharmacists reported continued overprescribing by Dr Kulczyk in October, she reported the matter to the Medical Council, Mr Leonard said.
The Medical Council wrote to Dr Kulczyk on November 18th, 2008, and the same day gardaí visited her over concerns about her pattern of prescribing of drugs. A month later a preliminary Medical Council hearing established that she had a case to answer.
Mr Leonard said that Dr Kulczyk’s solicitor, Tom Coughlan, later wrote a letter to the Medical Council in which he indicated his client would be admitting all the facts which the Medical Council argued was an admission of poor professional practice.
It would be for the fitness to practise committee to decide then whether Dr Kulczyk’s pattern of prescribing benzodiazepines in terms of frequency, composition and duration of prescriptions amounted to the more serious charge of professional misconduct.
The hearing would hear evidence that Dr Kulczyk had told one pharmacist that she had issued prescriptions after patients presented referral letters from a psychiatrist, Dr Richard O’Sullivan at Arbour House drug treatment centre, but that no such person existed.
Ms Creed said she was alerted by pharmacists concerned that medical card patients attending other doctors began appearing with private prescriptions from Dr Kulczyk for large quantities of benzodiazepines in 2008.
She was concerned about patient safety and the fact that patients might be at risk from such overprescribing so she met Dr Kulczyk who said that she knew why she was calling because a patient to whom she had issued a prescription had been found selling drugs.
The hearing continues today.