HOSPITAL'S RESPONSE:Tallaght hospital in Dublin said yesterday there were never anything like 30,000 GP referral letters left lying around the hospital unopened.
It was responding to a claim by Tallaght GP and Trinity College Dublin public health specialist Prof Tom O’Dowd that thousands of GP referral letters were left sitting around the hospital unopened in 2009. Prof O’Dowd estimated that the number could be as high as 30,000.
He drew the attention of the chairman of the hospital board, Lyndon MacCann, and the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) to the problem last year but the HSE said last night it was never informed.
In a letter in April 2009 to Mr MacCann, Prof O’Dowd said he had been told by a manager at the hospital that “two years of GP referral letters” had not been opened or reached the consultant to whom they were addressed.
Hiqa raised Prof O’Dowd’s concerns with the former chief executive of Tallaght hospital, Michael Lyons, in May 2009 but Mr MacCann said the letter sent to him at the hospital never reached him.
Last night, in a brief statement, Tallaght hospital said: “There was never anything like 30,000 unprocessed letters.
“All GP referral letters are opened on receipt and processed according to speciality.
“In October 2009, action was taken to clear a backlog of 3,498 letters which had not been reviewed by a consultant. All of these are now actively being dealt with.”
However, it did not say how many unopened letters existed in early 2009 when Prof O’Dowd first raised his concerns in writing.
A hospital spokeswoman said the letters were not unprocessed in order to keep patients off their waiting lists. She stressed there are now no unopened GP referral letters in Tallaght hospital.
“There is no backlog of referral letters for either adult or paediatric services.
“In the past year we have significantly improved the GP referral system for a majority of our clinics,” she said.
The hospital will meet local GPs today to discuss trying to improve access to outpatient clinics for their patients.
It acknowledged there are “substantial wait times for some of our speciality clinics”.
It said it is actively working with the HSE and the National Treatment Purchase Fund to improve this.
Meanwhile, Mr Lyons has not responded to requests for comment on how nearly 58,000 X-rays were allowed to go unreported by consultant radiologists at Tallaght hospital during his tenure.
He resigned late last year on health grounds.
The HSE is today expected to announce details of who will chair an investigation being set up into the non-reporting of X-rays at the hospital over a four-year period.
Its understood radiologists at several other hospitals do not report all X-rays either but the results of a HSE audit on the precise situation, which began this week, are not yet available.
Tallaght hospital has said it does not have a breakdown of the public private mix of the unreported X-rays as they “are not broken down in that manner” and at the moment the hospital is focused on clearing the backlog “as quickly as is humanly possible”.
Also yesterday a member of the hospital’s board claimed it was being “hung out to dry” through the leaking of information about unreferred X-rays and GP referral letters.
The member said the problem in relation to both issues had been “solved” and a complete restructuring of the hospital’s organisation was being undertaken. “The question is why is someone trying to damage the hospital at this stage and hanging us out to dry.”
Prof Conlon, who began as chief executive designate last December, had done everything he could within the constraints he was facing, the board member said.
He declined to speak publicly, saying Prof Conlon had instructed board members to refer all inquiries to him or the hospital’s press officer.
A number of other board members also said they had been told not to comment, while the majority of members failed to return a message left by The Irish Times.