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22 — village July - August 2012
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Call for Coombe inquiry
Husband’s forty-year quest for truth about wife’s death following anaesthetic
23
M
ICHEÁL Grealy has waited almost
40 years to find out what caused the
death of his wife, Kathy, just weeks
after she gave birth to their first
child in Dublin’s Coombe Hospital. Admitted in
full health to the hospital after 39 and a half weeks
of a normal pregnancy on Christmas Day 1972,
Kathy Grealy died seven and a half weeks later in
the intensive care unit of St Vincent’s Hospital
where she was taken soon after her baby, Casey
Anne, was born.
The child died from congenital haemolytic dis-
ease on the day of her delivery after the Coombe
hospital medical team failed to identify the incom-
patibility between Kathy’s Rhesus negative and her
husband’s Rhesus positive blood groups. In this
case, the hospital had not established the incom-
patibility through a routine test for anti-bodies, or
taken adequate steps to ascertain that Kathy had a
pregnancy terminated some years earlier.
Kathy Grealy was an Australian-born citi-
zen who met her Mayo-born husband when she
first came to Ireland to trace her roots in the
mid-1960s. She died after food entered her
lungs – a complication known in medical terms
as Mendelson’s Syndrome – during the admin-
istration of the general anaesthetic before the
Caesarean birth. She had requested, and was
promised, that an epidural rather than a gen-
eral anaesthetic would be administered. The
Coombe hospital report of her case describes a
“regurgitation of small amount of gastric contents
on induction of anaesthesia after failure to pass
Ryles tube”.
The St Vincent’s in-patient summary on
her admission to the intensive care unit on St
Stephen’s Day 1972 records that “this woman was
admitted from the Coombe Lying-in Hospital for
intensive care following accidental
inhalation of vomitus (Mendelson’s
Syndrome)”.
The confirmation that her death
on 16th February, 1973 from com-
plications including ‘haemorrhage
from tracheostomy site’ and irre-
versible lung and kidney damage was
precipitated during the anaesthetic
procedure in the Coombe led her
distraught husband on an increasing-
ly-desperate journey to establish the
full circumstances surrounding her
medical care in one of the country’s
largest maternity hospitals. Kathy
Grealy had chosen the Coombe over
other, private, facilities, not least
because she was impressed by the
reputation of its leading gynaecolo-
gist, the late Professor J K Feeney.
The Journal of the Irish Medical Association
published in November 1973 provided an
apparently unambiguous explanation of where
responsibility lay for Kathy’s death, although it
also contained seriously inaccurate information
about her mental state. In its Annual Maternal
Mortality report for 1972 it described her
death as “avoidable” while the “hospital” was
the only item listed under the heading “Factors
of Responsibility”.
After almost 40 years of personal investiga-
tion and legal inquiries, not one individual or
institution has been made answerable for Kathy’s
“avoidable” demise. Nor has there been any expla-
nation why the 1973 report in the IMA journal
described her as a “psychotic patient” although
she had never displayed any psychotic tendencies
according to subsequent reports from experts in
the field.
In a letter sent to Grealy in August 2005, the
Master of the Coombe, Dr Seán Daly, stated that
there was no reference in the clinical notes “to
any type of psychosis or details that would suggest
that the description of psychotic patient should
have been applied to your wife”.
Dr Daly stated that he did not know “who
made the diagnosis, when it was made or upon
what is was based as there is no evidence from
the clinical notes that such a diagnosis was made”.
Yet the ‘diagnosis’ is written in black and white in
the IMA Maternal Mortality Committee report
on her case.
Efforts to get all of the notes, documents
and reports relevant to the issues have been
unsuccessful despite the involvement of law-
yers, politicians, a private investigator and the
Information Commissioner who was informed
back in 2002 that no relevant files exist in the
Department of Health or in the hospital.
Grealy met former Labour TD, and later Fianna
Fáil health minister, Dr John O’Connell, in the early
years of his search for truth and was
told by the politician that an inquiry
was urgently needed into certain cir-
cumstances in the Coombe, a view
echoed by two senior civil servants
in the Department of Health at the
time.
Over the years he has met
with a wall of resistance, not least
from within the medical and legal
professions.
It took an extraordinary ten years
before Micheál Grealy was informed
of the identity of the anaesthet-
ist who administered to Kathy. He
claims that he was told, wrongly, by
Professor Feeney that the procedure
had been carried out by someone of
another name.
When contacted since, the now-retired con-
sultant anaesthetist declined to answer any
questions until they were first put to his law-
yers. Attempts to contact other members of staff,
including nurses and mid-wives have proved fruit-
less to date.
Recently Village has been informed by senior
medical sources that there are issues of serious
public importance surrounding medical prac-
tice at the hospital during the years around Kathy
Grealy’s death.
Her husband is now seeking the assistance
of the Ombudsman’s office to help uncover any
illuminating official information - and hoping
someone who may know what really happened
makes contact with him.
It may require an independent inquiry assisted
by an expert obstetrician and anaesthetist to help
explain why Kathy Grealy and her daughter did
not survive childbirth and why other patients may
have suffered negligent care by personnel of that
hospital, in the Coombe and elsewhere.
The old Coombe Hospital
There are
issues of
serious public
importance
surrounding
medical
practice at the
hospital during
the years
around Kathy
Grealy’s death
¨
