Gillian Sherratt, the mother of nine-year-old Harvey Morrison, who died in July after waiting years for spinal surgery, has said any inquiry into her son’s case should be “wide enough” to “uncover everything it needs to uncover” so “people can be held to account”.
Ms Sherratt told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland that the “type of inquiry” had not yet been “set in stone”.
“What they have committed to is that there will be an inquiry into CHI (Children’s Health Ireland), spina bifida and scoliosis care, and that the terms of reference and the scope of that will be up to the parental advocacy groups and the parents actually using the service,” she said.
“It would be our opinion that it should be a public statutory inquiry because we need to ensure that it is comprehensive and wide enough to uncover everything it needs to uncover and that people can be held to account.”
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Harvey had spina bifida and scoliosis and faced long delays in waiting for spinal surgery. During this time, the curve in his spine deteriorated from 75 degrees to 130 degrees. It emerged last year that Harvey had been removed from CHI’s urgent scoliosis surgery waiting list, without his family being informed.
Commenting on the kind of inquiry the family sought, Ms Sherratt said: “The care for these children is like a puzzle, and so far they’ve only been looking at pieces through these reports and these reviews rather than looking at it as a whole – and it’s like while they’re focusing on one area, there’s failings in another.
“This has been a systemic problem going back years. We’ve seen that from the unpublished ... what’s now known as the Orphan Report, where these children have actually been harmed.
“It’s not even that they just didn’t get care, they’ve been physically harmed by the lack of care. And if they don’t go back far enough and they don’t go wide enough, we can’t uncover everything that needs to be uncovered for these children to give accountability, to give transparency.
“I think they’re promising things that should hopefully make the services better going forward, but we can’t forget about the children that have been failed in the past.”
Ms Sherratt said neither former minister for health, Simon Harris, nor the current Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, had further explanation why Harvey had been taken off the urgent surgery list.
“They didn’t have any new information to add in relation to that. I don’t think they themselves have that information,” she said. “We’ve tried repeatedly to get that information from the taskforce that was set up, but to this day we still have no more information as to why he was removed or who made the decision.”
The meeting had gone well, she said. “We felt like there was a lot that needed to be said ... We very much asked that they just allow us to speak because we’ve been trying to get this meeting for so long. We’ve had a lot that we’ve needed them to actually hear.
“We felt like they did listen, but at the same time there have been previous promises from Government and from ministers that haven’t been met. So we’re cautiously optimistic after it, but I do feel like they listened. Whether or not that will bring around the changes that we need to see is a different story.”
Mr Harris, who had promised that no child should have to wait longer than four months for scoliosis surgery, has “failed upwards”, Ms Sherratt said.
“I feel like if I was in a job where I was continuously not meeting my targets, I wouldn’t be promoted. I would likely be let go.”
Ms Sherratt said Harvey’s family would continue to advocate for others in his honour.
The Taoiseach told the Dáil on Tuesday that the Minister for Health wants to “reflect and discuss further” with Harvey’s parents the “precise nature” of the inquiry.
Micheál Martin said it was important to consider this “to get the most effective inquiry - obviously an inquiry that is transparent and public, but also that can enable us to get to the truth”.
He told Labour leader Ivana Bacik that they should also be able to “get to a better situation post inquiry for services for children right now and into the future”.
Ms Bacik said the inquiry should be public and “it must be statutory”. She said the Government has “three weeks to do right by every child” following an agreement for a follow-up meeting later this month.
The Labour leader said “nothing less than a statutory public inquiry will do because children are still facing long delays for surgery”. She added that “none of us will forget the heartbreaking testimony we heard from parents who spoke about having to listen to children wailing with pain through the night”.
