Waiting Time For Child Psychiatry Revealed

Children and young people are bearing the brunt of deficiencies in the health service with news emerging that over 3,000 children are currently on waiting lists for psychiatric assessments.

Official figures also show that as many as 1,000 of those have been waiting more than a year.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) statistics show that the overall figure represents a 15% rise over the past two years.

Similarly, hundreds of children and adolescents who have serious emotional issues are unable to get a counsellor or support of a similar kind.

It has also emerged that many young people with serious mental health problems are being admitted to adult psychiatric hospitals because there is nowhere else for them to go.

The State's mental health watchdog - the Mental Health Commission - has compiled research showing that 136 teenagers, some as young as 14, have been placed in adult units so far this year.

This bottleneck is having a very detrimental impact on patients. According to the Irish Psychiatric Association, delays in treatment for children with severe mental health difficulties is putting young people at a much higher risk of becoming chronically unwell.

The situation is most serious among emergency cases, or children who have severe psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression.

Meanwhile - as the children wait for assessment and treatment - much needed resources are being wasted in other sectors.

The cost of reviewing x-rays and CT scans for the 4,500 patients involved in a re-check of patients seen by one particular consultant has risen to more than €333,000.

The review, announced in May, focused on the work of just one locum consultant radiologist who worked at two hospitals in the north-east in 2006 and 2007.

The HSE indicated that the cost of the review to date has come out of the budget of the two hospitals where the consultant worked - Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda and Our Lady's Hospital in Navan.

The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, said that the review was for precautionary reasons because, in late 2007, the HSE learned that four patients at Drogheda and Navan had their diagnosis delayed due to an abnormality on their chest x-ray not being noted on initial examination by the radiologist.

The patients had follow-up x-rays, and were subsequently diagnosed with lung cancer. All four had since died, she said.

It has now emerged that a total of nine patients had a delayed diagnosis as a result of errors made by the doctor, but hundreds of other mistakes were made by the locum reading x-rays, although these errors did not have such significant clinical consequences for the patients involved.

(BMcC)