Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I want to make the position clear. When a serious incident such as this one arises the first action that must happen is that the practice stops or, in this case, what was not happening should begin to happen, to make sure that the 30,000 new patients coming in in recent months are properly attended to and that their X-rays are signed off by a radiologist. That was happening. The second part of the issue is to make sure that a clinical review is done. There is no suggestion or question of a cover up. We must be clear about this. What is then done is that in the interests of patient care a full clinical review is carried out, all of those X-rays are examined and if there are people affected they should be notified, having completed a clinical review. We can then say to everybody else that they are not affected in any way by this and the people who have been identified who must be spoken to are spoken to, as well as their families. That is the primary focus of what must be done.

Let us be clear about this issue. There have been 790,000 X-rays conducted in Tallaght hospital in the period we are discussing. If we were talking about making this issue known before the clinical review is conducted we would be trying to find out if the 790,000 people who had those X-rays were affected. The issue is that we conduct a clinical review in respect of those who were not signed off by radiologists and inform those people.

There are delayed diagnoses in two of the 37,000 or 38,000 cases that have already been reviewed. In that context, considering that the spectrum of risk in respect of error in radiology could be anything between 2% and 20%, that would indicate, as a general statement, and not taking away from the individual concern of any family that might be affected by this, that the cohort of X-rays relate to relatively low risk cases because there have been two out of a total of 38,000. Obviously, we have yet to have investigated precisely whether that delayed diagnosis affected outcomes, and that is something that will have to be dealt with clinically by qualified people.

In regard to the remainder that can be done by the end of May, if we were to proceed as has been proceeded with, and added resources have been provided since the chief executive officer came into the job on 15 December, what we are getting to then is a position where we will identify what will hopefully be a very low number and deal with those people specifically and be in a position to tell everyone else that they are not affected. The contention Deputy Kenny seems to be making is that by going about it in that way it was in some sense an attempt at a cover-up. It is not. It is an attempt to ensure that the focus is on the concern of patients-----

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