More than 100 youngsters with cleft lips or palates have been “harmed” because of huge delays to treatment at Bristol Children’s Hospital, a review has found. For two patients the level of harm was classed as “severe” as they suffered tooth loss or decay because of the waiting list backlog, a health board meeting heard.
University Hospitals Bristol & Weston NHS Trust (UHBW), which runs the service for the South West region at the children’s hospital and Bristol Dental Hospital, has apologised and taken steps to put things right, including hiring more medics and increasing surgery sessions and speech and language therapy. A report to the trust board said concerns about the cleft service from limited operating theatre capacity, pressure on speech and language therapy teams and long-term sickness of key clinical specialists were already apparent before the pandemic made the delays worse.
It said the impact on 268 patients waiting for treatment and their families was assessed between 2020 and 2022 in a major exercise called a “harm review”. A total of 118 of these were deemed to have experienced some degree of harm – two “severe”, 91 “moderate” and 25 “minor” harm – plus another 57 who were at “greater risk of coming to harm” subsequently as a result of the problems.
