A Tallaght Hospital doctor returns to the High Court hoping to halt disciplinary procedures against him.
Dr James Gray, who works as a consultant in emergency medicine at the hospital, last week applied for various orders against his employer, The Adelaide and Meath Hospital Dublin, stopping them conducting a disciplinary hearing which was scheduled for Tuesday, October 23rd.
He also applied for orders permitting him to continue in his consultant role at
without further interference.
The judge Caroline Costello granted Dr Gray permission to serve short notice of the injunction proceedings on his employers and then adjourned the case to Friday 26th October.
Over the last decade Dr Gray has been a very high profile and outspoken critic of how Tallaght Hospital is run.
His repeated criticisms of the treatment of his patients in the hospital’s overcrowded emergency department have got him in trouble with his employers.
In 2015 he felt compelled to write a bombshell memo to then Health Minister Leo Varadkar after a 91-year-old A&E patient with Parkinson’s disease suffered 29 hours on a hospital trolley in Tallaght Hospital.
This led to his employers conducting an internal review into the circumstances surrounding the disclosure and characterisation of certain “confidential patient information” in the national media.
Dr Gray went on record at the time describing as the decision by the hospital as “intimidation.”
At a 2011 inquest into the death of a man on a trolly at the hospital he criticised the “appallingly poor standards of sanitation” in his department.
In another display of defiance last year, he went on RTE Radio 1 show Today with Sean O Rourke and blasted Health Minister Simon Harris and the state of the Irish health service.
He said: “This is state institutional abuse.
“I can’t understand why people are not out on the streets in their droves protesting over this scandal that has been allowed continue.
“Patients are in conditions were there’s no confidentiality, no dignity, no privacy.
“They’re stacked heel to toe in conditions that are blocking access for staff, they’re sleep deprived, conditions tantamount to sensory torture, constant light, regular noise for days on end.
“The Minister is making all these non-specific statements on key issues, there’s nothing, there’s actually nothing specific there that gives me any hope that 2018 is going to be any better.”
Joanne Coffey, Communications Manager with Tallaght Hospital said:
“This case is not something we can comment on at all.”
