“POLITICIANS HAVE failed, are still failing and will continue to fail children in the health service,” the former Children’s Commissioner for England will tell an audience in Dublin this week.
Sir Albert Aynsley Green, Professor Emeritus of Child Health at University College London, will speak at the 10th annual lecture of children’s charity, Children in Hospital Ireland, which takes place at the College of Surgeons on Thursday.
While there have been staggering improvements in children’s health in his 40 years as a paediatrician, with the prognosis for many diseases improved and others eliminated by immunisation, “obesity, diabetes, lifestyle issues, substance issues and mental health” are the new challenges, according to Prof Aynsley Green.
Speaking last week, the former director of research at Great Ormond Street Hospital said that as the first Children’s Commissioner for England, he had seen important points raised by a 2001 public inquiry into the Bristol Royal Infirmary where the death rate of children undergoing open heart surgery was twice as high as elsewhere.
Prof Aynsley Green said comments by the head of that inquiry that “children are treated just as small adults who needed smaller beds and smaller portions of food” were still true. “Some of those attitudes are still present today; there is a view that children are just an add-on to general policy,” he said.
Appointed to government in 2000 as the UK’s first national clinical director for children, Prof Aynsley Green said the Bristol inquiry raised important points about why children’s health services had a low profile in government. “The first is children do not have a vote and their care is often subordinated to the demands of adults, especially the elderly where there is enormous political leverage.”
He said the second observation was that “nobody was in charge” of children’s health services, with “a fragmentation of responsibility for children’s health services from government right down to local level”.
Prof Aynsley Green said the building of the new children’s hospital in Dublin was “an opportunity for Ireland to put the health of children at the forefront of political debate”.
Prof Aynsley Green said with a population of one million children in Ireland “there’s every chance for you to be a beacon of excellence for the rest of Europe to show how you really can put children at the heart of government”.
