Editorial: Mortuary review's damning revelations should not have been buried
The report criticised hospital management over their handling of the mortuary.
It is five years since the Waterford News & Star broke the story concerning serious inadequacies in mortuary services at UHW, and 15 years since the need for a new mortuary in Waterford was first raised in the Dáil.
While we now have excellent mortuary facilities in Waterford – finally opened in 2021 – it involved immense campaigning by staff at the coalface in UHW to get this addressed.
An independent review was commissioned when the Waterford News & Star revealed the horrific situation at the morgue in UHW in 2019.
Finally seen by the public some five years later, this review paints a damning picture of management’s handling of long-standing inadequacies in the service in Waterford.
The review into mortuary services at the Model 4 Waterford hospital tells us much of what the Waterford News & Star revealed back in 2019.
In 2018, four Consultant Pathologists wrote to then CEO of the South/South West Hospital Group (SSWHG) Gerry O’Dwyer outlining the desperate conditions of the mortuary and the urgent need for it to be upgraded. The letter went unanswered for five months.
The review paints a picture of poor communication between the SSWHG and UHW staff.
While the purpose-built mortuary that now stands out at Ardkeen is to be highly commended, the story of what pathologists and Waterford families had to endure must not be forgotten.
This review was probably never intended for the public light of day, but its contents, and its very publication for our viewing, remain crucial.
Staff at UHW had to face comments from then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar calling into question the concerns they were voicing. He described what he had heard as “strange”, stating that “no evidence has been brought forward to support the claim that dead bodies were decomposing on corridors”.
While he apologised for his comments a few days later, it must have been a particularly difficult time for all concerned.
In the years since the review’s commission, many questions were asked regarding its status, both in and outside the Dáil.
Its release now comes with somewhat of a whimper – with it emerging that neither UHW nor the Department of Health actually received the report, which contains 39 recommendations regarding mortuary services at UHW.
Let’s finish with some thought for those working in the conditions that persisted in 2019 when this story first emerged. Four pathologists in Waterford in one year had done 600 postmortems, compared to 12 pathologists in CUH (Cork University Hospital) who had done 800, in facilities that were grossly under par to carry out their work.
Top level management - the hospital was under the scope of the South South-West Hospital group at that time – are rightly criticized in the review. How they could allow this situation to persist for so long, year after year for more than a decade, should be publicly addressed at the top level of government.
