Hospital consultants are prioritising private patients over those on public lists, a TD has claimed as he revealed details of a leaked report on Children’s Health Ireland (CHI).People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said the EY report, commissioned by Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, shows children “who need urology surgery are waiting up to a year longer if they don’t have private health insurance”.Citing examples in various health sectors, he said a urology consultant in a sample group in the report has 20 public child patients with an average waiting time of 12.4 months, while 10 private patients wait 1.84 months.In urology, of the 73 patients reviewed, 41 per cent were treated outside the clinical recommended time frames, with a median delay of 152 days. “There was one case where a child waited seven years for routine surgery,” Murphy said, raising the issue in the Dáil.An orthopaedic consultant cited in the report had an average waiting time of 8.7 months for public paediatric patients and two months for private patients.“That’s pretty much across the board in terms of a massive discrepancy of waiting time in public versus waiting time for private,” the Dublin South-West TD, who has received part of the EY report, not the full document, said.“Kids who need time-sensitive spinal surgery are waiting more than six months longer because their little bodies are less profitable to operate on.”For spinal patients, only 41 per cent – nine out of 22 – were treated within the clinical recommended time frames, and 59 per cent faced delays, sometimes for several months, “with a median delay of 143 days”.[ Rotunda consultant row is just the tip of the icebergOpens in new window ]Calling for the report to be published immediately, Murphy said the document showed “children may wait longer than clinically recommended for assessment, investigation, or treatment of potential consequences for clinical outcomes, disease progression, and quality of life”.He said “just as private healthcare has no place in the Rotunda, it should have no place in Children’s Health Ireland”.Replying for the Government, Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said he had not seen the report and did not know “what version you have that’s leaked”.But he stressed the Minister for Health commissioned the report to investigate practices in CHI “and to ensure that there was equity of treatment of patients”.He added: “I am confident that she will take action, because she has demonstrated quite clearly over the last number of days” that when she guaranteed public-only consultant contracts “she has got results”.Murphy said, however, that commitment to public healthcare is somewhat undermined “by the fact that private suites are being built in the new national children’s hospital right now – more inequality literally being built into the system”.The Minister said Carroll-MacNeill worked to ensure “patients get equality of care right across our economy”. He said great work had been carried out with public only consultant contracts and that almost 70 per cent of consultants worked on public only contracts.Through these contracts “we can manage clinically, we can manage consultant availability with public demand”. The public only contracts were already showing improvements; in the Mater hospital there were an additional 180 CAT scans monthly and 84 MRI scans, he said. In other hospitals many theatres “are now operating on weekends. We get additional days out of consultants and, critically, that key decision makers are in the room when patients have to be triaged and clinical decisions have to be made.”