Cancer Mistake Victimizes Woman

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Irish Voice News

Cancer Mistake Victimizes Woman

May 24, 2007

By Paddy Clancy

HEALTH Minister Mary Harney has apologized to a 41-year-old woman who was mistakenly given the all-clear after a breast cancer test and had to undergo a mastectomy 14 months later.

Rebecca O’Malley from Ballina, Co. Tipperary, underwent a biopsy test for breast cancer in the Midwestern Regional Hospital in Limerick, in March 2005.

The test was sent to the pathology department at Cork University Hospital for analysis and was returned with a negative result.

However, on the recommendation of her own family doctor when she visited him in April last year with a bad cough, O’Malley took a repeat biopsy and the results showed she had breast cancer.

A report by the Cork hospital into how she was mistakenly given the all-clear has concluded that human error was to blame. The report found that “internal and external reviews” into the case pointed to “the original test result being an interpretive error.”

Harney has said she will make a decision on whether to seek an independent investigation once she has studied the hospital report.

O’Malley, a mother of three, is not satisfied with the report. She said it did not explain how a conclusion of human error was reached, and it did not satisfy her request for an independent review.

“Behind every human error is a systems error and that has not been identified. There are clearly not the structures in place to catch errors. It only informs my view that there must be an external report,” she said.

O’Malley described how, when first told the samples were benign, her family was overjoyed, only to be plunged into despair when the cancer was discovered 14 months later.

The first news was warmly received by her husband, Tony, and three children Katie, aged seven, James, six, and Lucy, four.

“I was ecstatic and overjoyed,” she said. “Only another woman who has gone through that wait for a test result will know the feelings involved.”

The second test samples were sent to London instead of Cork and the analysis confirmed she had breast cancer. O’Malley was then further shocked when told that, despite the original error in testing, she would have to wait a further four weeks for breast surgery in Limerick.

Husband Tony insisted that no further delay could be tolerated and, less than a week later, his wife went to London where a full mastectomy at the Royal Hospital in Fulham was carried out.

She then had to undergo a grueling course of chemotherapy and further surgery because follow-up tests indicated traces of cancer in the lymph nodes under her arm.

O’Malley is now determined that no other woman should have to endure the same ordeal.

“I am calling for an independent review as to how this could have occurred. We are talking about people’s lives here,” she said

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