Qld dental health: Minister open to transparent child waiting list data

The Queensland government is open to reporting dental waiting list data as children and their parents are left to suffer in the dark.

Health Minister Tim Nicholls on Thursday

• Editor’s view: A positive step

The Queensland government is open to reporting pediatric waiting list data for the most serious dental treatment, as demand blows out and desperate parents are left clueless as to how long their children need to live in agony.

Health Minister Tim Nicholls said he was “happy to look into it” following a report in Thursday’s Courier-Mail in which the Australasian Academy of Paediatric Dentistry called on Queensland Health to publish the waiting list data for children needing treatment under anaesthetic.

The current published waiting list combines adult and children, and dentists say it is not a sufficient record of the critical state of pediatric dentistry.

The academy insists that adults and children should not be assessed under the same priority categories.

The academy‘s advocacy and policy committee chair Tim Keys said he was pleased to see the government was prepared to look into the waiting list problem.

“At the moment some Queenslanders, depending on where they live, are waiting 18 months or more for a hospital appointment,” he said.

“Children are suffering for prolonged periods with multiple abscesses and rotting teeth.

“Parents are at their wits end waiting for their turn, but are often left in the dark as to when that might happen.

“Meanwhile the kids don’t sleep, skip school and have behavioural problems due to crippling pain.”

Australian Academy of Paediatric Dentistry advocacy and policy committee chair Dr Tim Keys

There are 3516 adults and children in the state waiting for treatment under anaesthetic.

“I would imagine many of those are paediatric cases as children need to go under anaesthetic much more often than adults,” Dr Keys said.

“With extreme decay across the mouth children can’t cope in the chair.”

The dentist said that if a child is going under anaesthetic for dental work it is a serious matter and should be a Category 1 or 2 and never a 3.

“Currently, there is also no standard criteria for what a category 1, 2 or 3 is,” he said.

“Each health service can pick their own.

“This could result in some areas manipulating the categories to look better than they are.

“Also, oral health services in Queensland are not required to run general anaesthetic services for children — it is not part of the standard of services.

“Most of them do offer this but they are not funded for it, and this can deprive the service of resources they need for other patients.

“This all contributes to the large waits for patients.”

The current criteria shows Category 1 should be treated within a month, a Category 2 within three months and a Category 3 within a year.

Queensland’s chief dental officer Dr Ben Stute said: “Our hospital and health services actively review waiting lists to see if alternative care can be offered, to avoid dental treatment in hospital and to identify measures to ease pain or discomfort while children are waiting for hospital treatment.”

Originally published as Qld dental health: Minister open to transparent child waiting list data