The HSE policy of offering orthodontic treatment to children in regions other than where they are located is a good practice because of the variation in waiting time for treatment, according to Minister for Health Leo Varadkar.
He said that in the Dublin Mid-Leinster area, “there is only one person who has been waiting more than seven months for assessment yet there are 556 children in the Dublin North East area waiting between six and 12 months for assessment”.
Mr Varadkar was responding to Labour TD Seán Kenny who expressed concern about a family in Dublin whose son is on the Ashtown Gate dental clinic waiting list, being offered orthodontic treatment in Dundalk.
Reading a letter from the HSE about the offer, Mr Kenny described the tone of the letter as “interesting” and said “effectively it is putting a gun to the patient’s head”. The family had two weeks to reply and would be contacted within six weeks if they accepted but the treatment would involve 30 to 40 visits to Dundalk over two years and the child could not under any circumstances be seen in Dublin.
Mr Kenny said the father was working and the mother had Crohn’s disease, which made travel difficult. The cost was also a factor.
Mr Varadkar believed the only thing wrong with the letter’s tone “is that it does not give an indication as to where a person is on the waiting list for Ashtown Gate. If it did, parents could make an informed choice as to whether to wait it out at Ashtown or go to Dundalk.”
The Minister said he would pursue this issue with the HSE, but he pointed out that when there was capacity to give the treatment sooner in another location, about 75 per cent of patients choose to accept it. He said that at the end of June this year, 23,982 patients were in treatment, 6,658 were awaiting assessment and 16,518 were awaiting treatment.
If it was not possible to bring waiting lists down everywhere, he said, it made sense and was fairer “to allow people who live in an area where there is a very long waiting list to choose to transfer to an area where there is a low or no waiting list”.
That was why this is being done, he said. “It is an attempt to provide a bit of equity across the regions so that people do not face excessive delays just because they happen to live in the wrong place.”
He added that of the 4,000 cases in HSE Mid-Leinster, “only 87 have been waiting more than two years whereas 748 of the 3,786 cases in HSE Dublin North East have been waiting for more than two years”.
