THE High Court has approved a €325,000 settlement against the HSE in the case of a 54-year-old Donegal woman who died after a ‘catalogue of errors’ in her care.
The family of Bridie Kelly, from Drumbeigh, Mountcharles, have urged the HSE to take on board the recommendations of a serious incident review.
RTÉ reports that Ms Kelly died after a failure to properly diagnose and treat a blood clot.
She had attended the emergency department on 27 February 2018 with intense pain and swelling in her leg.
Despite a D-Dimer test showing her to have two-and-a-half times above normal levels, she was discharged home.
She returned to hospital on 22 April where the same test for blood clots showed she had a level ten times the upper limit of normal.
On 30 April, Ms Kelly died after suffering a massive clot on her lung.
Lawyers for the family said that she was effectively untreated for 48 hours.
It emerged that at the time of her death Ms Kelly was undergoing an unnecessary CT scan of her brain, which was meant for another patient of the same name.
Doireann O’Mahony, BL, told the High Court that the Kelly family was aggrieved at how she was ‘neglected and deprived of life saving treatment’.
