Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion and for shining the spotlight on this. The first line of the motion "notes that, as of 13th February, 2024, there are 327 children listed as waiting on a scoliosis-related surgery with Children's Health Ireland (CHI), as compared to 312 in February 2017". That is despite promises, despite everything. I am not going to use my time to repeat everything that is set out. It is set out clearly.

I am not sure how a person could not agree with setting up an independent task force. The families are very welcome but they should not be here. They should not have to go through this pain on top of what they have been through. The Minister of State knows that, but the point is we are here in relation to that and we are here after three reviews. There is the one that is ongoing at the moment and we have no idea how long it will take. I tabled Dáil questions. I do not know whether there are any interim reports and we do not know the timeline for the completion. That ongoing report, with another 17 further cases identified, comes on top of three previous reports. Earlier one of the TDs said there is an absence of governance and institutional issues and I certainly agree. There are serious issues with CHI itself as to how things were not picked out along the way. The ongoing review now comes on top of the internal report, namely, CHI’s Spines Clinical Review Report from May 2023, the external report Children’s Health Ireland at Temple Street Spinal Surgery Programme for Patients with Spina Bifida from 7 July 2023 and an internal report, Spina Bifida Spinal Surgery Clinical Outcomes Review 2023. Imagine we have all these reports and a fourth report while families watch their children deteriorate in front of their eyes. It is beyond endurance how the CHI could not have had a pro-active approach to this, telling us what was necessary. I cannot fathom how we have come to the point where I am standing up supporting an independent review because the system has utterly failed over and over.

That internal reviews begs so many questions about this situation. This has happened over and over as the Minister of State knows, such as at Portiuncula and Portlaoise in relations of deaths of infants and mothers and so on. I will look at Galway and go parochial for just a moment. About a year ago HIQA visited University Hospital Galway and in its wisdom told us it was “grossly overcrowded” in the accident and emergency department. This is the new accident and emergency department, the temporary one that cost €16 million because the new one has gone into cloud cuckoo land. On the day HIQA visited for an unannounced inspection it praised the staff and the progress made, but gave a damning indictment of the situation that remained on the ground. The inspectors said “the ED was grossly overcrowded” with 28 patients on trolleys. Does the Minister of State know how many are on trolleys as we speak? It is 54 today. It was grossly overcrowded with 28. Taking any week in the last while we have had 54, 61, 58 and 55 people on trolleys.

If it was grossly overcrowded with 28, HIQA has no language left to tell us about this.

On top of that, the situation whereby children and paediatrics were to have a different route into the hospital has gone by the board. We hear an awful lot about University Hospital Limerick, and rightly so, and Cork. The regional, despite the work of the staff, remains the third worst hospital in terms of waiting lists, inadequate accident and emergency services and the failure to adopt the options appraisal, which was to build a brand new hospital in Merlin Park. That never happened, so we continue piecemeal.

In the context of tonight's discussion, the waiting list figures for orthopaedics in Galway are absolutely damning. It was 400-odd for orthopaedics and a couple of hundred for urology. Going back over the years, orthopaedics generally has been the worst for waiting lists. In the past, I have read out a letter in which the consultant said they could not stand over the pain being suffered by patients. That is Galway, separate from this specific issue, but the whole lot taken together is an indictment of what we have allowed to happen in a Republic.

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