Twenty Cork children have been waiting longer than four months for their first scoliosis appointment, but Children\u2019s Health Ireland (CHI) has said it cannot reveal how many are awaiting actual surgery, due to \u201cpatient confidentiality\u201d, despite having released this information previously.<\/p>\n
The 20 children suspected of having scoliosis and on the orthopaedic outpatient waiting list at the South Infirmary-Victoria University Hospital have been waiting longer than four months to be seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor any surgical intervention, these patients are referred to CHI Dublin,\u201d the HSE has said.<\/p>\n
When local Sinn F\u00e9in TD Thomas Gould asked, via a parliamentary question, for the number of Cork-based children on CHI\u2019s list who have been awaiting scoliosis surgery for longer than four months, CHI said that they were \u201cunable to release the information \u2026 due to patient confidentiality\u201d.<\/p>\n
They added: \u201cThe waiting list for scoliosis is a CHI waiting list and includes children from all counties. Patients are treated firstly on the basis of clinical priority and secondly on the basis of length of wait.\u201d<\/p>\n
A CHI spokesperson said:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI can advise that the scoliosis operational plan is in place and CHI is working on improving access times for all children with scoliosis.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
However, at the end of 2023, Mr Gould asked then-minister for health Stephen Donnelly a similar question, and he said that there were 11 children from Cork awaiting scoliosis surgery at the end of that November. This included five patients waiting less than six months, and six patients waiting over six months.<\/p>\n
Queried by The Echo if this 2023 response was a breach of patient confidentiality, a CHI spokesperson said: \u201cThis did not constitute a breach of patient confidentiality. The information provided was aggregated data only and did not identify any individual patient or family.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Gould told The Echo: \u201cIt is absolutely shocking that 20 children are waiting for a hospital appointment with suspected scoliosis. Commitments were given and these have never been met.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the same time, it would appear a motto of \u2018circle the wagons\u2019 has meant CHI no longer provides information to the public on these cases. The minister didn\u2019t pluck these figures from thin air previously. He was given them by CHI to provide them to me. Why is this suddenly not allowed?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty Cork children have been waiting longer than four months for their first scoliosis appointment, but Children\u2019s Health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[11246,79,103,2120,61,60],"class_list":["post-305783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-childrens-health","tag-cork-news","tag-health","tag-hse","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}