A medical professor at Trinity College Dublin has appealed to the Master of Coombe Hospital to resign following the controversy over family members receiving Covid-19 vaccines.
Prof Deirdre Murphy, head of obstetrics at Trinity and a consultant at the Coombe, said in a letter to the board of directors of the maternity hospital in Dublin last week that Master Prof Michael O’Connell had made “serious errors of judgment” with the vaccination of 16 family members of staff for priority groups late on 8 January.
She said he “no longer enforces the respect of his colleagues” following the “vaccination scandal” and the publication of the independent inquiry for the hospital board this month.
His errors of judgment were “exacerbated by the way he tried to dispel responsibility for his actions,” she said.
According to Prof O’Connell, the decision to vaccinate family members was not his, but reached by consensus through a group of 11 consultants and staff in discussion.
The review by Brian Kennedy SC also found that Prof O’Connell did not put another hospital consultant, Dr Carmen Regan, in the way of taking doses home to vaccinate family members.
In her April 7 letter, Prof Murphy said the master ‘has overall responsibility for the events surrounding the vaccination of family members in the hospital and in a consultant’s home’.
‘This behavior has been brought to the attention of the Medical Council and is likely to justify a review process. “He must stand aside in the best interests of the hospital,” she wrote.
‘It is the board’s responsibility to hold Dr O’Connell accountable for his actions as master / chief executive. The board has not fulfilled its duty, and contrary to the recent statement, it is failing to uphold the strong values of this community-based hospital.
“There is a ‘disclosure’ policy within the hospital that requires transparency when things go wrong with patients,” Prof Murphy wrote.
Frontline workers
“How can junior doctors, midwives and nurses be expected to disclose their clinical errors if the master / chief executive does not accept responsibility for his own poor judgment?”
She said there were 39 medical students ready to be vaccinated at night, and that health workers in obstetrics in obstetrics, ultrasound and physiotherapy were also overlooked and that they had to wait a few weeks during the pandemic for the next round of vaccinations. .
She also inquired about how the council could confidently say that the 16 family members were the only people vaccinated out of order, while 120 people not identified before arrival by the local HSE community hospital group, without any official documentation at the Coombe was vaccinated.
In response to a series of questions to the Coombe council and master, a hospital spokesman said the hospital, in line with the recent statement on the controversy, ‘takes seriously what has taken place and started a process’ to address the implications’.
She said that “key actions and measures are being implemented to ensure that such an incident does not happen again and that hospital guidelines and protocols will be improved, with the specific focus on instilling our strong values as a community-based voluntary hospital. lie”.
