Review of spinal surgery at Temple Street hospital could take 12 months, says HSE boss
A Picture: General Hospital Of View Street Niall Hospital Temple In Children's Dublin Carson/pa Irish Wire
The HSE’s external review of spinal surgery in CHI at Temple Street hospital could take 12 months, CEO Bernard Gloster said.
Speaking at lunchtime on Thursday, Mr Gloster said if the review indicates that other children were affected, this will be investigated. The HSE boss also said he cannot comment yet on whether senior CHI management were aware the consultant whose work is being scrutizined was using unauthorised implant devices.
His comments come in the wake of public outrage at serious safety concerns in complex spinal surgery for 19 children with spina bifida in CHI at Temple Street hospital, part of the Children’s Health Ireland hospital group.
Mr Gloster said the HSE’s review is expected to be written in such a way that it can fully published.
“I’m happy for him (the external reviewer) to risk assess and approach this,” Mr Gloster said. "If he tells me that the best approach to that is to look at multi-sites or multi-specialities or to look at historical caseloads, or to look at current approaches, that’s what will be done.
“The scale of the terms of reference he has could certainly go well out over the next 12 months, but we would certainly hope, subject to agreement, that the priority dimension would be scoped out before the end of the year, and up and running.”
He expects interim reporting as findings emerge during the process, if the reviewer agrees. The HSE boss will meet the external reviewer “on Monday week” and he expects Health Minister Stephen Donnelly to attend.
“We always have to be open to the possibility in the context of going to review something as serious as this, that other issues might emerge but we have to equally allow that to stand to fair and objective assessment,” he said.
“I couldn’t say that (if more children will be found or not). All I can say is that CHI did an audit, they identified what they believed was the correct scope of the number of children within the concern they were dealing with. That was 19, unfortunately as we know one of those children has since passed away.”
Mr Gloster said about the use of unauthorised devices in three children: “We do have to see how the end-to-end processes actually did not detect that particular problem. We really have to allow that investigation to actually happen.”
In relation to senior management’s potential knowledge of this process, he told the : “CHI have to be allowed, to be fair, to do their own investigation of how that happened. I reserve the right to see what the outcome of that is, and then if we need to take other steps, to either inquire into that further or consider that further, of course we will do that.”
He was speaking to media during the Nursing Homes Ireland annual conference held in the Lyrath Estate hotel in Kilkenny.
Reviews previously carried out by CHI, published on Wednesday in full after only publishing a summary on Monday, show among other concerns, one child after their initial complex operation required 33 further visits to the operating theatre.
The HSE’s external review will be led by Selvadurai Nayagam, Consultant in Orthopaedics and Trauma, and Head of the Limb Reconstruction Unit at the Royal Liverpool University and Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospitals.