Children forced to go to North for dental care

CHILDREN eligible for orthodontic treatment are being denied treatment in many areas and parents are being forced to go into debt to send them to the North for treatment, it was claimed yesterday.

Ted McNamara, a leading practitioner based in Limerick, said consultant orthodontists were encouraged to remove children from waiting lists on the grounds that they are not bad enough to be treated.

“We don’t really have a service worth talking about,” said Mr McNamara who claims that some children had already been damaged by a collapsed service.

The situation is particularly acute in the Mid-Western Health Board region although Dr Mary Hynes, the board’s regional manager for acute services, said significant progress had been made on the orthodontic list over the past two years.

There are almost 850 on the public waiting list and many families have to borrow to pay for private treatment outside the State, usually in the North where some treatment can be up to two-thirds cheaper than in the Republic.

A study carried out two years by the Consumers’ Association of Ireland revealed that a simple tooth extraction which can cost up to 100 in the South was available for half that price from dentists in the North. Some treatments, particularly cosmetic treatments like porcelain crowns, could be had for one third of the cost in the North. However, changes in the value of sterling have since narrowed that gap.

In a letter to Batt O’Keeffe, chairman of the joint Oireachtas committee on Health and Children, Mr McNamara claims that “good efficient orthodontic services” which existed between 1985 and 1999 were “attacked, undermined and destroyed because they were good and efficient”.

Health Minister Micheál Martin is due to meet the committee on May 27 to explain the problems in providing orthodontic treatment.

Mr McNamara condemned what he called a “cynical” approach to cutting waiting lists.

“In 1999 orthodontic services were attacked. The Department of Health and Children could have protected the services. As a result, children who were in the middle of their treatment were placed at risk. Many ended up with poor quality treatments and some ended up damaged,” he said.

His view is shared by Ian O’Dowling, Cork’s only public orthodontist, who said the service has also disintegrated in the Southern Health Board region, with almost 3,000 youngsters waiting for up to four years for orthodontic treatment.

Mr Dowling, who is based at St Finbarr’s Hospital, said funding for orthodontics had remained static in the Southern Health Board for the past three years. Another reason for the long waiting lists, he said, was the Department of Health’s attempts to change eligibility criteria set down in 1985 guidelines.

“For the past several years, the Department has been urging us to narrow the criteria so that it’s harder for people to be eligible for treatment. If we follow their recent requests, children with crowded and crooked teeth won’t be treated,” he said.

He believes that these changes are an attempt to artificially reduce waiting lists by ensuring fewer children are entitled to be on the lists.

A Southern Health Board spokesperson said that Cork University Dental School and Hospital had recently recruited a new Professor of Orthodontics with the aim of establishing a specialist orthodontic training programme. “This will have an enormous impact on the future of the overall public orthodontic service,” a spokeswoman said.