Hip problems: shortage of doctors partly to blame

THE number of late diagnoses of developmentally displaced hips in young children is on the increase and a shortage of community health doctors is partly to blame.

Dr Bridin Cannon, a public health doctor in Cork, said there was also a growth in the number of baby boys given a late diagnosis of undescended testes. This could lead to malignancy and damage fertility prospects, Dr Cannon said.

Addressing members of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), Dr Cannon said dyplastic or displaced hips should ideally be picked up in newborns but sometimes the condition developed at a later stage. For this reason it is no longer called congenital hip displacement, she said.

“You are checked in the maternity hospitals and the GPs do it at six weeks as well, but if you’ve only done six newborn babies in the year, you’re not going to be very good at testing,” Dr Cannon said. Previously a dedicated ‘hip doctor’ carried out the testing, but child developmental services were now so overstretched, this did not always happen.

Failure to deliver an early diagnosis could cause a limp and lead to extended surgery for a child, she said.

“Community health doctors have been totally run down and pulled for everything and everything, including all the vaccination programmes, which are really important, but we don’t have enough resources to cover everything,” Dr Cannon said.

A motion deploring HSE underfunding of child development services was passed.

At a scientific session, doctors heard that an estimated 1,500 lives could be saved each year if food manufacturers were compelled to clearly label products which have high sugar, salt and fat content.

Prof Antony Staines, School of Nursing, UCD, said there had been a voluntary agreement between a number of major players in the food industry and the Food SafetyAuthority to reduce the salt, sugar and transfatty acid content of their foods, but it was time now to make it mandatory through regulation.

Separately, IMO chief executive George McNiece called on the Government to “be more open” about its plans to introduce universal health care. Health Minister Dr James Reilly said he intends to introduce a model based on the best aspects of models used in other countries. He also said two new health insurers had expressed interest in entering the Irish market in the past few months.