THE waiting list at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children is "totally unacceptable", according Dr Paul Oslizlock, one of the paediatric cardiac consultants there.
Dr Oslizlock is consultant to Rebecca Metcalfe, the 17-month-old baby with a hole in her heart whose mother has been told she will have to wait until June 1998 for another appointment with him.
With "between 1,200 and 1,500 children" on the waiting list for appointments, and the list for the unit at Crumlin full to the end of 1998, Dr Oslizlock describes the situation as "the worst in Europe, next to Albania and Greece.
Having worked in the US and the UK, and being familiar with the experience of many other countries, Dr Oslizlock says he has "ever come across anything like the situation in Ireland ... It is unique in developed countries."
While waiting lists have been a problem for the past four or five years at the hospital, the situation has become worse in the recent past. Dr Oslizlock is worried that the hole in the heart operation "could become impossible by the time we get around to it" (as the children get older).
At present there are 150 children, "all of whom are classified as needing surgery", at Crumlin. The waiting list for surgery is several years", he says. Parents have been remarkably patient", as they understand that he and the other paediatric consultants at the hospital are doing all they could.
As well as coping with the demands of such a waiting list, a lot of their time is taken up with dealing with distressed parents, Dr Oslizlock says.
They have been on deputations about the problem to the Department of Health. He has been on three such deputations himself, the last one a month ago. They have tried to impress on the Department the urgency of the situation, but Dr Oslizlock feels officials at first believed Crumlin might be overstating the case. Latterly, he thinks, the Department is beginning to realise this is not so.
They have made concrete proposals to the Department as to how the matter could be sorted out, he says. Essential to the solution is the employment of more full-time paediatric cardiac consultants. A State of this size and level of development should have six, Dr Oslizlock says. It now has two, himself and a colleague at Crumlin, with another available just a third of his time.
It has been estimated, he says, that the cost of the employment of the necessary number of paediatric cardiac consultants/surgeons and the installation of the facilities necessary to solve the problem once and for all would be £5 million.
A spokeswoman at the hospital's appointments section said Rebecca Metcalfe's appointment was deferred for 11 months as the consultants would be away in July. The waiting list for the cardiac clinic was, on average, "a year" for first-time appointments for "new children", she said, "and another 14 months if you miss that one".
Mr Tom Crilly, a Workers' Party candidate in Dublin South East, who has highlighted Rebecca Metcalfe's case in election literature, says it demonstrates that while the well-off can use private insurance "to leapfrog all the queues and avail of facilities that have been paid for by the taxpayers of this country", low-paid workers and the unemployed "wait in line and face terrible and worsening queues". Rebecca's case is "just one of many" he says.
A spokesman for the Department of Health did not comment on the specific case but drew attention to a recent announcement that "£500,000 is being allocated to alleviate the waiting list problem".
