New squint service launched at Ulster Hospital

New squint service launched at Ulster Hospital in bid to tackle waiting times

Transcript

00:00We've just recently set up at the start of the month a new theatre list, so once a week

00:09we're coming and doing paediatric squints, so two or three squints will be done on the

00:14list each week here in the Ulster Hospital, which is a real asset to the service.

00:20The squint is whenever a child's eye turns either inwards or outwards, and there are

00:26six muscles around the eye and any of those can be working either too strongly or not

00:32strong enough, so surgically we'll go in and either strengthen a muscle or weaken a muscle

00:37and that helps to realign the eyes cosmetically for the child.

00:42We set up a service here to take some patients off the waiting list by running a squint list

00:50every Friday morning, so we do two or three patients on the list and myself and the team

00:56have set up this service to be able to carry this out, so it'll greatly reduce the waiting

01:03list for the patients.

01:04They're just so over the moon to be able to get their child's surgery carried out after

01:10waiting for so long and to have it so local, it's been a couple that we've done already

01:15and we've had great results, so it's just continuing to improve this in the future and

01:20it'll be a superb service.

01:24There's lots of different reasons to do the surgery, the biggest, most troubling one for

01:28children can be those children who suffer with double vision, which can really affect

01:31their quality of life, and the other thing that children have is that if they aren't

01:38using both eyes together they can lose their depth perception and we can sometimes recover

01:45that for them, and then really the most important one to a lot of children is that if your eyes

01:49aren't straight, that's cosmetically unappealing, so we're restoring them to the natural position

01:56that their eyes should be in, and many children will report that it's very stressful, that

02:02people are commenting on it, so it really can make a good difference in their life at

02:08any age really.