NSW health minister declines to intervene to force gender data fix at Maple Leaf House
Regional gender clinic Maple Leaf House received 443 new referrals in 2023, and saw 983 patients, but has no record of hormone treatment.
NSW’s Health Minister will take no immediate action to rectify deficiencies in record keeping at the regional gender clinic Maple Leaf House despite the government and senior clinicians overseeing the service having no idea how many teenagers are being placed on cross-sex hormones.
The Australian revealed on Monday that Maple Leaf House has no data on how many children it is putting on the hormone therapy or what their sexes were at birth, despite taking in the vast bulk of NSW teenagers who want to change gender.
The service responded to NSW Labor MP Greg Donnelly, who sought basic numbers under Freedom of Information laws, saying it had discovered “nil” documents when running a search of its records to check those details.
Mr Donnelly later challenged the lack of data provided in a NSW tribunal, and the NSW Crown Solicitor’s office told him Maple Leaf House could not reveal the number of adolescents prescribed cross-sex hormone drugs, given to older teenagers because “there is no extractable data field in the Patient Information System” used by the service in relation to the prescription of such drugs and “nor is a manual register maintained with respect to this information”.
Every other state gender service provided numbers to Mr Donnelly on the provision of cross-sex hormones, which cause infertility among other irreversible effects. Mr Donnelly branded the NSW health department’s failure to provide the numbers for Maple Leaf House as “nothing short of a scandal”.
“Maple Leaf House operational procedures make the UK’s failed Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic’s look good,” he said.
Maple Leaf House opened two years ago and its case numbers were immediately enormous relative to its regional adolescent population.
It received 443 new referrals in 2023, and saw 983 patients.
That compares with 63 new referrals at Sydney’s major children’s hospital gender clinic at Westmead, where 149 were seen.
It is understood that paediatric endocrinologists based at Westmead have been refusing en masse to prescribe puberty blockers for much of the past year.
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park refused to answer a question on Tuesday as to whether the failure to keep records of cross-sex hormone prescription or as to the natal sex of patients would be rectified at Maple Leaf House.
NSW is awaiting the results of a review into the provision of gender medicine. Queensland Children’s Hospital is also undertaking a review of its services.
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