The target of a four-month waiting time for children needing surgery for scoliosis has “no clinical relevance” and is “used as a stick to beat us”, according to the head of the State’s paediatric spinal unit.
David Moore, who leads the spinal unit at Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), the organisation responsible for providing healthcare services to children and young people in Ireland, said the unit will complete 520 spinal surgeries this year, a record annual number.
This is up about 12 per cent on the more than 460 surgeries completed in 2023, which Mr Moore attributed to increased resourcing and “protected resources”.
The Government has consistently stated it wants to see no child waiting more than four months for spinal surgery after the target was initially set in 2017 by then minister for health Simon Harris.
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However, Mr Moore said the period of four months has “no clinical relevance” and that waiting times should be based on the clinical needs of a patient and not an “arbitrary” timeline.
“I’m not trying to be controversial but we don’t, the clinicians don’t agree with that target. The formal target is a stick that we’re beaten with, you’re beating us with it again, but it’s not a clinical target. We want patients to be done in the appropriate clinical time frame.”
Mr Moore said: “When we were given more resources and this spine unit was set up at the start of the year, obviously people had to take up their posts and any plans had to be implemented. So really the increase in activity only happened from about the summer.
“The delivery of more cases was based on an upswing of really only on six months. Whereas next year, given we have continued resources from the Department [of Health] and the HSE, then we would expect to do more next year.”
A total of 15 of this year’s surgeries were conducted abroad, with five in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and 10 in New York.
“That’s 15 patients out of approximately 520, that’s less than 3 per cent of our workload is abroad. So while there’s been lots of media coverage, it’s really a drop in the ocean relative to the workload. It would be nice for that to be acknowledged from the point of view of all the staff in CHI who are delivering a huge amount of services to Irish patients,” Mr Moore said.
He believes there will be fewer surgeries abroad next year, due to the complexity of patients on the waiting list. At the end of November 247 children were on a waiting list for spinal surgery.
Of the 115 awaiting a scheduled date for surgery, just under half (51) had been waiting between zero and three months and 23 had been waiting three to six months. A total of 15 children had been waiting more than a year, of whom four had been waiting longer than two years.
Mr Moore said the unit was “getting ahead of our run rate”, meaning an average 44 patients were added to the surgical waiting list every month, and it was “just ahead of that now in what the system is delivering with treatment”.
He added that surgeries get cancelled for a number of reasons including bed shortages due to increased unscheduled care demands on the hospital. However, he said 30 per cent of cancellations are due to patient preference, such as due to family or social commitments.
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