Madam, – In all the talk about the mishandling of X-rays at the hospital in Tallaght, one question continues to be avoided: how did this happen?
I’ve heard reporters and interviewers ask, but each time the question was passed over with a few banal comments about fixing the problem. Of course the problem should be fixed. But that has nothing to do with the question of how this happened.
How did 58,000 X-rays fall through the cracks? How did the doctors who originally ordered these X-rays respond to the absence of reports on them? How did the various support staff who would have handled these X-rays respond? Did anyone ever complain? If so, who got the complaint and what did they do about it? And if no one complained, why didn’t they?
I have worked in a busy hospital and understand how X-rays could be mishandled, although it shouldn’t happen. But it is one thing to mishandle a few and it is another thing entirely to mishandle thousands and thousands.
What has happened in the Adelaide and Meath Hospital, Incorporating the National Children’s Hospital, in Tallaght, isn’t an occasional error or even the incompetence of an individual or a few individuals. The numbers are too large for that.
It is impossible for a reasonable person not to believe that this has been a conspiracy against the public good.
This doesn’t mean that a group of people set out with a plan to undermine healthcare, but it does mean that at some point early in this long sad chain of events individuals decided to protect their colleagues rather than the patients they were hired to look after.
And it is so that we can root out this culture of circling the wagons that we must now demand an answer to the question: how did this happen? – Yours, etc,