PARENTS of children with serious heart conditions have reacted angrily to local health bodies appearing to back the transfer of vital services from Belfast to Great Britain.
A public consultation on the future of the paediatric heart surgery unit at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children ended last Friday.
However, a major review of services (the Kennedy Report) was published earlier this year which described the current arrangements as “unsustainable”.
Speaking to the News Letter last week, Dr Miriam McCarthy from the Public Health Agency said she recognised that travelling from Northern Ireland for treatment meant inconvenience for families, but said fewer people across the UK would be affected if the care was centred on the mainland.
“I can fully understand people living in Leicester and Birmingham and Manchester saying: ‘Why would I travel across the water to Belfast for surgery?’ That would be a very difficult one to persuade people to do,” she said.
Some of the parents are particularly angry that their own comments – where they have stated they would “travel to the moon” to get their children the best treatment – have been interpreted as them accepting “second class citizen” status.
Julie Greenaway, whose five-year-old son Lewis has already undergone five heart operations, said she is “absolutely horrified” that somehow it is “not appropriate to ask the families and children of the UK to travel by air to Belfast,” yet acceptable for health chiefs to expect children from Northern Ireland to travel to GB for treatment.
“The children of Northern Ireland deserve the very best treatment in a centre as close to home where possible,” she said.
Although young Lewis Greenaway’s condition has required him being treated in Birmingham over the years, his mum is concerned that others from the Province will be put through unnecessary distress by the proposals.
Mrs Greenaway said: “The financial worries and hardship doing this have been extremely worrying and stressful.
“I have had to leave my younger children behind for periods up to a month and in fact my youngest child was only four weeks old when we once had to travel for treatment.”
Another mum who contacted the News Letter was Maria Kennedy from Bangor.
Mrs Kennedy has a rare heart condition as do her three sons and all have been operated on in the Belfast unit.
She said: “It’s so unfair for the parents and children from the north of Ireland to be treated as second class citizens. Why our children?
“We will fight this all the way to as far as we can. It’s our children’s basic human right to avail of health care on their own doorstep rather than split up families for some bureaucratic reason.”
Mrs Kennedy, who serves as secretary of the Children’s Heartbeat Trust charity, presented a petition containing more than 13,000 signatures, urging the retention of services in Belfast, to the Stormont health committee in September.