By Philip Murray

A BRECHIN woman is facing a possible £5000 bill and fortnightly trips to London after the NHS refused to pay for her daughter’s medical treatment.

Dawn Wallace’s six-month old daughter, Ar’den, has plagiocephaly, or flat head syndrome, a condition caused when the plates in a baby’s skull are pushed out of shape before they have a chance to fuse together.

While the condition is not fatal, it can prove traumatic for youngsters as they grow up.

The problem can be remedied by wearing a special helmet that forces the skull into a normal shape while the bones are still malleable in infancy.

But NHS doctors are refusing to pay for Ar’den’s treatment, arguing that it is purely for cosmetic purposes and there is not enough evidence to prove the helmets work effectively.

This has left Dawn staring at a £2000-plus bill for the helmet and a similar amount for travelling expenses while Ar’den is treated.

And she is “fizzing” that a health service that already pays for cosmetic surgery such as ear pinning, breast implants and tummy tucks is refusing to stump up the cash for her daughter’s medical care.

“The NHS say they won’t fund the treatment, which just seems silly,” she told The Courier.

“The cost of £5000 for the helmet and travel is a lot of money for anybody to have to pay.

“They class it as cosmetic so I have to pay but what gets me is that you can get your ears pinned on the NHS but you can’t get a helmet for a child. I just don’t understand that.

“The doctors say it could correct itself but there are plenty of cases where it doesn’t. You can’t correct the skull using the helmet after 12 months because the plates have fused and if she needed surgery to correct it then they would have to crack the skull and reshape.

“This, to me, could cause brain damage. And then there are the costs involved for the NHS of her going into surgery, the cleaning of the theatre, etc.

“All of that would easily cost them £2000, which is all it would cost for the helmet, but they won’t pay. It just isn’t right, I’m fizzing.

“After we drive down to London to fit it, it then has to be adjusted every two weeks to make sure it still fits.”

Dawn, who also has a daughter named Carmen, added, “They say that because we’re in Scotland they may be able to push it to every three weeks, but it still means going down to London regularly.

“I’m on maternity leave at the moment but what happens when I’m back at work and I need to take regular time off for these trips?

“Then there’s the cost. If I’m not successful in getting anything from a trust, I will have to get a loan and, at the end of the day, it’s for one of my kids—they come first.

“We just have to hope we don’t have to go down the road of getting a loan.”

Local councillor Ruth Leslie Melville has taken up Dawn’s case and while she is quietly confident a local trust may fund the treatment if an appeal to NHS paymasters falls flat, she has been left frustrated by the decision to class Ar’den’s care as cosmetic.

“To my mind, this treatment isn’t cosmetic at all because it will give the girl a quality of life instead of enduring a difficult condition, potentially for the rest of her life,” she said.

“It won’t come to that because there would be surgery if the helmet didn’t work but you still want something like this dealt with as a matter of urgency. I hope to talk to the [health] board’s members soon about this,” she added.

NHS Tayside is not convinced the helmet is necessary, however, and has insisted that insufficient evidence exists to prove the helmet’s effectiveness.

Dr Peter Fowlie, director of women and child health at NHS Tayside, said, “The neonatologists and the neurosurgeons in Tayside generally think there is not enough evidence to support routinely using helmets in the management of plagiocephaly.

“Any cases of plagiocephaly which we think are particularly severe will be referred to neurosurgery for neurosurgical opinion.”