Consultants ‘evasive, rude and uncaring’

THE Scally report has highlighted the appalling manner in which some women were told their smear test had been misread, with one informed in the same room where her mother had died.

The report said many of the women and their families described the appointments as ‘stressful and sometimes highly traumatic’.

In three cases, the meetings were held in the same room where the women had first been told of their cancer diagnosis.

In one of those, the meeting took place ‘by chance’ in the same room in which the woman’s mother had died.

The inquiry was also told by many women and their relatives that consultants became defensive when questioned on why they had not previously disclosed the error.

In one particularly shocking encounter, one woman said that when she asked her consultant why she had not been previously told, he responded ‘What difference does it make?’ When she then asked him how she would be informed from now on, he told her to ‘watch the news’.

Another woman recalled being left without answers. ‘When I tried to question my oncologist further on what this meant and if I had cancer three-and-a-half years prior to diagnosis, he shut down, refused to answer the simplest of questions, and ushered me out the door with no support and many questions,’ she said.

Many of the women were left upset by the attitudes and responses of their consultants when they pressed them on why, if the information had been available in 2016 and 2017, they had not been told previously.

One of the excuses given to the women was that the information ‘got lost in the file’, with another consultant claiming that he ‘didn’t know the protocol’.

One patient told the inquiry: ‘He couldn’t look me in the eye.’ Another recalled: ‘He had seen I had had a hysterectomy and decided I didn’t need to know.’