600 deaf children misdiagnosed as hearing.

The parents of some 600 children have been sent letters asking them to bring them in for another assessment at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool.
All were seen by a single doctor who worked in the audiology department from February 2007 and April 2011.

Last year managers discovered a child who had been assessed by the doctor as having normal hearing, actually turned out to be profoundly deaf. A subsequent audit of the doctor's patients found that in total nine patients identified by him as normal, needed hearing aids. The doctor has been referred to the General Medical Council.

A spokesman for Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust said the doctor had since left the hospital "for personal reasons".

He emphasised that the 600 represented only a small fraction of the 16,000 patients seen by the audiology department over the four-year period. Professor Ian Lewis, medical director, said: "The majority of these patients have also been seen by other members of our Audiology Team and we therefore believe the risk of misdiagnosis is low."

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