Ulster Unionist MLA Robin Swann has said the next Health Minister must urgently address the intolerable situation facing families of children in Northern Ireland requiring heart surgery. In a response to an Assembly Question current Health Minister Simon Hamilton again confirmed that children from Northern Ireland are still being sent to England for treatment given there remains insufficient bed space in Dublin.

Robin Swann, Chair of Stormont’s All Party Group on Congenital Heart Disease and a father of a child who has required paediatric cardiac surgery, said:

“Despite being told repeatedly that changes to local paediatric cardiac services were required in order to improve local service provision and best meet the needs of patients, all that the International Working Group has achieved so far is a set of recommendations and the death knell of local surgery.

“I did agree that the long term sustainability of children heart services here would be strengthened by working on an all island basis. Whilst my preference would have been a dedicated service located here in Northern Ireland, I do agree that a service in Dublin is still better than no service at all.

“As the Minister recently reiterated to me in an Assembly Question the majority of elective procedures on local children are now being carried out by specialist heart centres in England. This is because not enough capacity has been developed in Dublin to accommodate local families. It was shameful that the decision to end the provision in Belfast was taken before capacity existed in Our Lady’s Children Hospital.

“The previous Service Level Agreement between Belfast and Dublin should never have been allowed to come to an end until there was sufficient capacity in Dublin. I believe that lapse of attention, either intentional or not, by the DHSSPS was inexcusable.”