Healthcare Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-05
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Marie Sherlock (LAB), Dublin Central

The meeting last September was hugely important, and very welcome, but there was a large degree of alarm weeks later when the scheme was published that the names repeatedly mentioned at that meeting of the surgeons operating on women in Romania and Greece were not on the list. I have a very real concern that there is a lot of confusion about the most appropriate persons to treat complex endometriosis and that there is a large degree of deterrence, and women are not going to apply to the scheme or maybe they have engaged with the Department to ask questions about surgeons who are not on the list, and, ultimately, will be excluded from the new scheme. The reality is that we do not have numbers because they have not been properly coded in terms of who has been travelling abroad up to now and where they have been going under the treatment abroad scheme. That has been a real problem.
The second key issue I have a concern with is that the surgeons on the list are very much gynaecologically-focused but endometriosis is a whole-of-body inflammatory condition. My concern is that the list is very narrow, while being very long.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-05