Mid Western Regional Hospital and the Clare Champion

The Press Ombudsman has decided not to uphold a complaint by members of staff at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital that two articles published about events at the hospital in October last were in breach of Principle 1.2 (Truth and Accuracy) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines. The subject of both articles was the circumstances surrounding the death at the hospital of an acutely ill person who had been brought to the hospital by family members in the early hours of the morning.

The complaint arose primarily from the reporting by the newspaper, in its first article about these events, of claims made by members of the deceased’s family that they had been banging on the door of the hospital for four to five minutes before receiving a response, and that when Gardai arrived one of them got the assistance of the ambulance crew. This was interpreted by the complainants as calling into question or undermining the credibility of the way in which the hospital staff had treated the deceased.

The allegations complained about in this article were not reported as fact, but were attributed to members of the deceased’s family. While it is not a requirement of the Code of Practice that the truth or accuracy of claims made by and attributed to individuals in a news story, and contested by others, should be investigated to finality by a publication prior to publication, the publication concerned has to show that it has striven adequately for truth and accuracy in the time available to it before publication. In this case, the HSE was invited to respond to the claims made by the deceased’s family, and the article included substantial coverage of a statement issued by the HSE which included a rebuttal of some of the claims made by the family of the deceased.  In these circumstances, the article did not raise any issues in connection with the Code of Practice.

The hospital complained that the second article was also in breach of the Code of Practice because it repeated an unfounded claim by a family member that when they got to the hospital there was no doctor or ambulance there, and that a suggestion in the article that the contradictory evidence about the timing of events raised questions concerning the level of timeliness of the care provided to the deceased by the hospital staff. The family’s claim that Gardaí had arrived at the hospital before the ambulance did was also disputed by the hospital.

The claims by family members which were disputed by the hospital staff were specified in some of the six questions put to the HSE by the newspaper prior to the publication of the second article. This article included a general response by the HSE to these queries in which it repeated that statements in the first article attributed to family members were untrue, and that the CCTV records demonstrated this clearly. The HSE’s general response, however, did not refer to any specific allegations by the family cited in the newspaper’s questions, and did not respond to a direct query inviting it to explain the contradiction between the timing of events as set out in their initial statement to the paper, and timing evidence from Garda logs of telephone calls on the morning in question. In the circumstances, the newspaper’s posing of questions to the HSE, and its publication of the HSE’s response in the same article, was reasonable evidence that the publication concerned had striven sufficiently for truth and accuracy in relation to this article, as required by Principle 1 of the Code of Practice. For these reasons, the complaint about the second article is not upheld.

One significant contradiction about timing was not finally resolved until the hospital informed the Press Ombudsman, at a late stage in his investigation, that the time originally given to the newspaper was mistaken, was based on the memory of one of the duty personnel, and had been furnished to the newspaper shortly after the events concerned in an effort to be helpful and to meet newspaper deadlines.

It is evident that many of these issues could also have been resolved between the publication of the first and the second articles if the HSE had responded appropriately to the specific question about this apparent contradiction put to them at that stage by the newspaper. This inevitably contributed to continuing misunderstandings between the parties, and to the difficulties in achieving a satisfactory resolution of the matter.

While the hospital said that CCTV evidence supporting its account of what had happened at the hospital, and the timing of events there, had been offered to the newspaper prior to the publication of the first article, the newspaper said that the offer to review the CCTV and other evidence available had arrived after press time for the issue in which the first article had appeared. It viewed the material subsequent to the publication of the second article, following an intervention by the Press Ombudsman, and then accepted that the hospital staff had responded to the emergency in less than a minute. It then offered to publish a ‘news story’ in response to the complaint, but the text offered was turned down by the complainants.

The investigation of this complaint involved substantial work, by both the complainants and the newspaper, in checking facts, documents, and recordings. While it did not succeed in effecting a resolution to the complaint acceptable to both parties, it was of considerable assistance to, and is appreciated by, the Office of the Press Ombudsman. It should also be stated that the newspaper, in all of its correspondence in response to the complaint, said that it had never at any stage suggested or implied that the nursing and medical staff and ambulance crew on the scene at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital on the night in question did anything other than all in their power to save the life of the deceased, and affirmed that they acted in a totally professional manner.

11 May 2011