PARENTS FOR JUSTICE:THE SPOKESWOMAN for the Parents for Justice group, Charlotte Yeats, received a phone call from the Rotunda Hospital yesterday morning warning that contents in the retained organs report "would be unsavoury but would be fixed".
She said a member of the group was contacted by the Coombe hospital yesterday in advance of the report’s publication to answer queries posed three years ago and to which she had received no response.
Commenting on an apology to families from Rotunda Hospital master Dr Sam Coulter-Smith yesterday, Ms Yeats said “no doubt he is sincere but it’s not going to help the families”. The report “hasn’t brought closure or any kind of comfort”, where the families were concerned. “It has just given rise to further questions.”
Ms Yeats said the group was surprised to hear of a separate HSE report on postmortem practices at the Rotunda, which was conducted by a team led by Ian Carter, chief executive at St James’s Hospital. “I don’t think anyone realised there would be two reports,” she said. They were told yesterday that about six months into the independent audit the HSE commissioned Mr Carter to investigate practices at the Rotunda. It was Mr Carter’s decision not to interview families but they should have been told, she said.
Arising from both reports, “138 families will have to make further inquiries about the organs of their children. It is going to be traumatic for those families.”
The Parents for Justice group was also “shocked to hear that in 2004, hospitals received loose guidelines on the disposal of organs”.
It meant that a lot of the organs would have been disposed of during the term of the Dunne inquiry, set up in 2000.
This inquiry, under senior counsel Anne Dunne, investigated organ retention practices at hospitals in the State until it was wound up in 2005.
