How the health system is ‘failing’ little Ryder
Ryder Barton can’t eat food normally and his dad says he is always in pain, but the health system says he must wait for life-changing surgery.
VIC News
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Little Ryder Barton was born with bright blue eyes but not a heartbeat.
He was revived — after giving Euroa parents Adam Barton and Tara Campbell a fright — and spent his first four weeks in hospital special care nurseries.
Severe and persistent reflux has meant the 16-month-old cannot eat orally, and is instead fed through a nasogastric tube.
“He is a happy baby — he hasn’t known any different — but he is clearly in pain,” dad Adam Barton said.
After a string of local hospital admissions and trips to the Royal Children’s Hospital, doctors decided Ryder would need life-changing fundoplication surgery to wrap part of his stomach around the oesophagus.
But the family was last month sent a letter saying Ryder had been placed on a waiting list to see a paediatric surgery specialist and would be contacted every three months.
Mr Barton said the system was “failing” Ryder and had left him “suffering so much pain”.
After the parents pleaded for help, Health Minister Jenny Mikakos arranged an appointment at the Royal Children’s Hospital next month.
Ryder is fed through the tube three times a day, and then over a nine-hour period at night with less than 1mL a minute released into his stomach.
But even those drip feeds are often too much, causing the youngster to vomit in his sleep.
“I get up in the morning and hope that he is alive,” Mr Barton said.
“All night all we hear is ‘cough, cough, cough’.
“You can hear the pump make a little noise when it injects a millilitre and then immediately you hear him coughing.
“We are basically tag teaming 20 minutes of sleep so that we can check on him. With the vomiting, it is indirectly life threatening.”
Opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier said it was “simply unacceptable” that families had to wait months for specialist medical care.
But a Royal Children’s Hospital spokeswoman said it treated the state’s most seriously ill kids, with those in most urgent need seen first.
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“While the RCH cannot publicly discuss an individual patient’s circumstances, we can confirm that all children are assessed and treated based on their clinical need, as determined by specialist paediatricians,” the spokeswoman said.
Ms Mikakos said she understood parents’ anxiety when their child was unwell.
“(We) wish this family all the best with their little boy,” she said.
“The world-class specialists at the Royal Children’s Hospital are the experts who make decisions about each patient’s care.”