Fresh concerns have emerged about potentially serious patient safety issues at Tallaght hospital, this time involving consultant referral letters for X-rays and other procedures going missing from its appointments system last year.

However, the hospital – which was last week forced to admit that thousands of GP referral letters went unreviewed at the hospital during 2009 – has refused to release details of how many consultant referrals for tests were 'lost' last year.

The problems came to light after Tom Fennelly, a prominent campaigner on behalf of cancer services at the hospital, told the Sunday Tribune that a close family member had waited four months for an X-ray appointment after being referred for an urgent test by one of the hospital's own consultants.

In a letter to the hospital's then chief executive Michael Lyons, dated 4 September last year, Fennelly outlined how the patient was given a referral form by the consultant and told "to take it to the second floor and hand it in (personally) to get an urgent appointment."

But after waiting four months for the X-ray appointment to come through, Fennelly said he contacted Lyons' office directly, to be told by his assistant that "the reason for the wait is because no such appointment ever existed".

"Your PA then checked [the consultant's] records and found that they existed on his computer but the persons responsible for making the X-ray appointment had lost them," Fennelly wrote.

Contacted on foot of Fennelly's experiences, the hospital confirmed that the issue of patients missing appointments after being referred for tests by its consultants will form part of an ongoing review of problems at the hospital.

But it would only confirm that there was currently "no backlog of referral letters for either adult or paediatric services from consultants or from GPs".

Separately, it has emerged that a staff nurse with Tallaght's Hospital In The Home service, which was outsourced to a private provider, was dismissed in December 2007 after she allegedly gave Fennelly's family member the entire contents of an intravenous drip over the space of a few minutes.

This was despite the product guidelines stating it should be administered over a period of an hour.

Fennelly claims the nurse in question hung the intravenous drip from a chandelier in his home. He subsequently received an apology from the service provider, Tara Healthcare.

Meanwhile, the State Claims Agency has confirmed that it is due to meet with management at Tallaght Hospital to discuss the potential risks of litigation by patients who suffered health problems as a result of unread X-rays and unreviewed GP referral letters last year.

Fine Gael's James Reilly yesterday claimed the backlog of X-rays from Tallaght Hospital could have been tackled "within a month" if the work had been outsourced by the HSE.

He also told the Dáil last week that at least five other hospitals –Beaumont, Blanchardstown, Cavan, St Vincent's and Cork University – need to clarify whether X-rays of their patients were read properly.