The state government will launch an independent external review into Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital for wrongly programming the cochlear implants of one in four children in its program, causing what are expected to be lifelong development problems.
It follows calls from the families of the 30 children affected for an independent investigation, with the cause of the problems still unclear nearly a year after the hospital was alerted to the issue.
Six-year-old Logan Smedley is one of at least 30 children whose cochlear implant fitted at the hospital was not mapped correctly, meaning he could not hear many sounds crucial to learning to listen and speak.
"As a result of the hospital's failure to turn up Logan's cochlear implants over approximately four years, we believe he's severely delayed in his hearing and his speech," his father, Dale, said.
"It's stressful, day in, day out."
On Monday morning, South Australia's Health Minister Chris Picton said he agreed with the families involved, that an independent review was needed.
"I thank the families for speaking yesterday, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to be a parent and have that situation for your child," he said.
"Today I have asked the chief executive of SA Health Dr Robyn Lawrence to commission an independent review ... I think we need to learn what's happened over these past four plus years at Audiology ... and make sure that we can learn the lessons, so that this is not repeated in the future."
Mr Picton said the hospital's own investigation would be superseded by the external review which would be conducted by an "interstate expert".
"I think people will have a lot more confidence if somebody from outside our system coming in with a fresh set of eyes to look completely objectively at what's happened over the past many years," he said.
"We want to have family and patient involvement in that so that they've got the opportunity to have their voices heard as part of that interstate review into this matter.
"I absolutely commit that that external report will be made public."
Concerns raised last April
Audiologist Nicole Eglinton alerted the hospital and health regulators last April after seeing the same problem in nine of her patients.
"The first child that came through, we thought that might be an anomaly," she said.
"This is not something we see often and we were alarmed and really in disbelief."
She said she had to "battle" to get the hospital to investigate her and the affected families' concerns.
"Our initial testing has shown that they didn't have the important access to all of the sounds that they needed to learn to listen or speak.
"Critical periods are between zero and three years to learn and develop language.
"Many of these children have missed this opportunity."
Natalie Salter said she was "devastated" to find out the cochlear implants in both her sons were not allowing them to hear any sounds.
"This meant everything we had done over the last couple of years in relation to our boys' hearing had been done in vain," she said.
"We lived in the country at the time, so we had frequently driven six-hour round trips to appointments to seek the best care.
"I want to be clear that this should never have happened.
"We want assurances that no other families will have to experience what we have over the last couple of years.
"We need to do better to ensure our family and others are given informed based audiological care, given a choice in their providers, and confidence that our children are receiving the treatment they deserve."
The Women's and Children's Hospital network said an internal review into what went wrong had been underway since last May, but it was still months off completion and it did not yet know what the cause of the problem was.
"We immediately took action to investigate this problem, we notified all of the families in our program which was 117 families," Women's and Children's Hospital director of surgery Sonja Latzel said.
"We identified approximately 30 children who had maps that were not correctly adjusted and we have taken steps to adjust those maps.
"We have great regret over the fact that these children did not have these maps adjusted correctly and wish to express our apologies to the families involved.
"We are taking every step we can to ensure that this will not happen in the future and investigate the causes that led to this."
Apology to families
The hospital said it was "a very complex" investigation and could not discuss whether compensation would be paid to the affected families and whether the review's findings would be released publicly.
The hospital's management said it had been very open with the affected families and apologised to all of them, but the state opposition said that was not the case.
Opposition Health Spokesperson Ashton Hurn yesterday called for an independent inquiry into the incident.
"It's heartbreaking and devastating in equal measure," Ms Hurn said.
"We believe the government should be demanding answers of this, so that no other South Australian family have to endure the same genuine heartache and despair that these families have had to.
"The only way to get these answers is by launching an independent investigation."
