HSE deferral of obesity surgery ‘morally wrong’

A leading weight-loss surgeon at one of the country’s largest private hospitals has described the HSE’s decision to suspend surgery for dangerously obese public patients for the rest of the year as "morally wrong".

Even though Colm O’Boyle potentially stands to gain from the HSE’s decision, he said that denying patients the option of bariatric (weight-loss) surgery “for whom every other option had failed” was “a catastrophe waiting to happen”.

The consultant general, laparascopic (keyhole), and bariatric surgeon at the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork said that the patients on the waiting list for the surgery — suspended at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin — had been selected on the basis that it was “a last resort”.