A draft report into 561 hip surgeries on children since 2021 found 79 per cent of the surgeries at Cappagh hospital and 60 per cent at Temple Street “did not meet the threshold for surgery”, the Dáil has heard.
Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty raised the issue of the audit report, which was carried out after a whistleblower alleged hundreds of hip surgeries on children aged one to seven were carried out unnecessarily.
“According to that audit, 561 children went through these hip surgeries since 2021. The audit shows that 79 per cent of the surgeries at Cappagh and 60 per cent at Temple Street did not meet the threshold for surgeries,” he said. “They were unnecessary.”
The Donegal TD said he had been contacted by a parent whose four-year-old daughter had surgery at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Cappagh. He said they had received a letter a couple of weeks ago from the hospital to inform her of the audit.
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The woman’s daughter was born prematurely, “facing many challenges in her first weeks of life”. This was followed by treatment for hip dysplasia and resulted in surgery that may not have needed to happen, Mr Doherty said. “She’s sick to her stomach that her daughter might have been operated on unnecessarily,” he said.
Another family told him “a consultant was telling them that they needed an operation on both hips for their young girl. They thought something was wrong.”
He told TDs they sought a private second opinion.
“They were told not only they did not need the surgery, that the child didn’t even have the condition.”
The Donegal TD said the issue was reported in the media in July last year. This was occurring less than two years after it came to light that unlicensed springs were implanted into several children at Temple Street Children’s Hospital, “and that scandal is still ongoing”.
Mr Doherty added that the draft audit report, completed in January, was now published in full on the Ditch website and claimed “there is not enough urgency in Government that this is what happens over and over and over again”.
The whistleblower “further alleged these surgeries were conducted purely for financial gain”, he said.
“Has the Government established that the allegations are true? Was some of this motivated by profits? There are hundreds out there that are living a nightmare of worry. Have all of those parents been contacted and crucially, the questions they’re asking is, when will they know if their child was operated on unnecessarily.”
Responding for the Government, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe insisted they were taking the matter very seriously and the clinical audit taking place was “in recognition of the seriousness of this matter”.
Many parents were deeply concerned and raising questions about the need for surgery and the impact of it, and “would have had their trust in our health service and our professionals at least being questioned”.
He understood the report “is now being looked at and clinicians are providing a final input into it. And that final input will be available to the author of the report very, very shortly if it hasn’t already been shared.”
It would be shared with the Department of Health and with hospitals. At that point the first priority “will be to communicate very clearly with all families”, to “share with them in a transparent and open way the conclusions of this report acknowledging, of course, that the stress, the worry that many face at the moment”.
They would respond to the consequences of any operations that took place. A “core theme” would be to understand why this happened in the first place “and what indeed are the consequences of it”, Mr Donohoe said.
“It’s all about ensuring that any surgical practice that took place during that period was carried out in a way that is consistent with international standards,” he added.
