To ask the Minister of Health (i) to detail his plans for resuming children’s routine orthopaedic surgery; and (ii) for his assessment of how delays and cancellations of these kinds of surgeries are affecting the delivery of all children’s orthopaedic surgery.

The Health and Social Care (HSC) service has been allocated £90m for non-recurrent waiting list funding. This funding is being used to secure additional in-house capacity and where necessary, independent sector capacity, to help reduce the waiting times for assessment and treatment across a range of services. This funding is being targeted initially at those patients with the highest clinical priority, including paediatric surgery patients. Additional capacity has also been secured from NHS providers in England and this includes additional scoliosis capacity for both adults and children.

It is unacceptable that any child has to wait longer than is clinically appropriate for surgery and I fully understand the distress and anxiety that long waiting times cause, particularly when they are suffering pain and discomfort. While the cancellation of some surgeries has been necessary due to the rising number of Covid inpatients in our hospital, I regret the distress caused to children and their families that are waiting for treatment, and acknowledge the detrimental impact this will have on already extensive waiting times. I have established a Regional Orthopaedic Network which is working to rebuild orthopaedic surgery services across Northern Ireland, including paediatric orthopaedic surgery. The Network is also working to identify opportunities for transformational change across the service, and as part of that work, a dedicated workstream has been established to consider paediatric orthopaedics specifically. Bringing our waiting lists to an acceptable level across a range of specialties, including orthopaedics, is a long term collective effort requiring sustained and substantial investment and additional staffing.