Thursday, 30 November 2023

Royal Children’s Hospital

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (18:40): (651) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health and concerns the Royal Children’s Hospital’s quiet update of their standards of care to endorse a radical expansion of the gender-affirming approach without considering the latest evidence. As the nation’s leading paediatricians in gender-affirmative medicine and surgery, the Royal Children’s Hospital have cemented their commitment to the narrow-focused practice of gender affirmation rather than adopting a multidisciplinary model, which many interstate and global children’s hospitals are moving towards.

Two leading experts in their field – George Halasz, a Monash Medical Centre child and adolescent psychiatrist, and Andrew Amos, an academic psychiatrist who was a leading trainer with Queensland’s health department – have called on doctors to resist the pressures of activism in a rush to affirm children distressed by gender dysphoria. They called for doctors to reflect upon the ethics of the affirmation model, in which powerful hormone drugs are given to children and surgical intervention is performed on minors. They called on doctors to observe the Hippocratic oath – first do no harm – and to reject widespread subordination of clinical governance to social and political goals. Halasz and Amos also warn Australian doctors to heed the cautionary tale of the many compensation cases made in response to the healthcare scandal at Britain’s Tavistock National Health Service gender identity clinic.

What we need is greater clinical accountability and transparency in guidelines at the Royal Children’s Hospital. We do not need an obstinate, unscientific blind trust in the gender-affirmation model resembling a form of radical social activism. It is outrageous that the Royal Children’s Hospital did not consider any recent studies and emerging evidence in the past three years when drafting new guidelines. I encourage the Royal Children’s Hospital to look to the New South Wales Children’s Hospital at Westmead gender clinic and the doctors who have analysed and questioned the success of a gender-affirming approach. In a rare academic study of the outcomes for gender-dysphoric children, it was identified 88 per cent had at least one comorbid mental health condition. More than 50 per cent were diagnosed with behavioural disorders or autism. One in five children who were seen later had their gender-related distress resolved. Almost one in 10 diagnosed with gender dysphoria later discontinued their transitioning process. As a result, the doctors concluded that a neutral therapeutic stance was needed to provide a much more diverse range of treatment options and pathways as an alternative to medical gender transition.

I call on the Minister for Health to ensure the Royal Children’s Hospital are providing the best possible standards of care by considering recent research which supports a neutral multidisciplinary approach to children with gender dysphoria.