The Medical Council should have a role in dealing with the consultants involved in the hip dysplasia controversy, the Taoiseach has said.
Micheál Martin told the Dáil the issue “should be formally referred” to the council or to the authorities in CHI (Children’s Health Ireland) and there was “an onus” on the council to be “proactive” in regulation of its members.
It is “important the Medical Council takes a role here in term of the professional regulation of its members”, he said.
He was responding to People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy, who questioned why surgeons at the centre of the controversy over paediatric hip surgeries are still operating on children.
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Mr Murphy said “one of them could do an osteotomy tomorrow. Surely they need to be suspended, or, at the very least, stopped from performing osteotomies until the audit is verified?”
An audit found that over a three-year period, 60 per cent of hip dysplasia surgeries in Temple Street and 79 per cent in National Orthopaedic Hospital Cappagh (NOHC) did not meet the clinical threshold for surgical intervention.
The Dublin South West TD quoted from an email sent by the then clinical director of Cappagh in November 2023; at the time, many children’s surgeries were being cancelled at short notice because other surgeons thought them unnecessary.
The clinical director, Mr Murphy said, had stated: “I have decided that patients listed for pelvic osteotomies will no longer be discussed at the MDT [multidisciplinary team]. It will be up to the patient’s individual consultant to review the X-ray and decide if they wish to proceed.”
It was “incredible”, Mr Murphy added, that “instead of saying something was wrong, the clinical director said ‘we will stop discussing them’” at the team meetings and “it will be fully in the hands of the original surgeon to decide what he or she would do”.
The Taoiseach agreed it was a “serious issue, because that seems to be a shutting down of the multidisciplinary team. The multidisciplinary approach is a safeguard against wrongdoing, poor practice or ill-informed decisions, because the collective can inform.”
Mr Murphy said the onus should not be on parents to request a review as he called for reviews to go back to 2002, when the operations began, rather than to 2010, as currently.
The Taoiseach said he did not want to put “too much of a burden on the parent”, but the issue should be formally referred to the Medical Council or the CHI authorities.
He stressed: “It is important now that the Medical Council takes a role here in terms of the professional regulation of its members.”
The council is the regulator of doctors in Ireland and is charged with promoting good medical practice. It is also the forum where members of the public can make a complaint against a doctor.
