James Cox and Julie Smyth
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has called for Government and the HSE to expedite the publication of plans to tackle Ireland’s escalating acute hospital waiting lists.
As many as 900,000 people could be on some form of acute public hospital waiting list when the latest data is published, according to the IHCA.
Speaking on WLRfm, IHCA vice president Professor Rob Landers estimated that 45,000 people could now be waiting for an appointment in University Hospital Waterford. The consultant pathologist at UHW said over the last decade, the situation has progressively deteriorated to a point where we are now in an absolute crisis:
"The Government and health service must stop hiding behind the pandemic and cyberattack as the main reasons for our growing waiting lists. We need multi-annual budgeting from the Department of Health and to bring together a plan to sort this problem out once and for all.”
The call came ahead of the latest National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) hospital waiting lists which are expected soon, following a two-month delay due to the cyberattack impacting reporting.
According to the latest available information online (from May 2021), there were over 885,000 people on some form of NTPF waiting list to be treated or seen by a consultant.
The number of people waiting for inpatient and day-case hospital treatment has grown by more than 31,000 in the past decade — an increase of 69 per cent.
In May 2021 there were 41,297 people waiting for an outpatient appointment at UHW, 15,231 of those had been waiting for more than 18 months.
Nationally over the past seven years due to insufficient consultant staffing and vacancies, a further 286,000 people are waiting on public hospital outpatient lists to be assessed by a consultant, an increase of 84 per cent.
Healthcare crisis
Consultants now fear that the next NTPF figures, expected to be published this month, could show significant increases across all waiting lists — anticipating the overall number of people waiting to be around 900,000 — taking Ireland’s health system ‘over the cliff edge’ and tumbling into another healthcare crisis.
Commenting further on the waiting lists, Prof Landers said:
“Over the last decade, the situation has progressively deteriorated to a point where we are now in an absolute crisis. The Government and health service must stop hiding behind the pandemic and cyberattack as the main reasons for our growing waiting lists.”
Within his own specialty of Histopathology, Prof Landers said that long wait times are nothing new. He noted that patients have been presenting with more advanced symptoms for the past number of years, which is a particular concern for those who come in for cancer resections (removal of tumours) at a later stage of progression of the disease.
“Patients are coming in at a more advanced stage — much more so than they should be, and more so than they would be anywhere else in Western Europe in particular. This is because people are waiting longer for operations and therefore are waiting longer to start follow on treatments like chemotherapy. This simply should not be the case,” said Prof Landers.
Growing waiting lists are not simply a result of Covid-19 but demonstrate the impact of years of consultant shortages and underinvestment in capacity across public hospitals, he said.
The IHCA points specifically to the 2012 Government decision to “impose pay discrimination” on hospital consultants taking up contracts after that date as one of the root causes of Ireland’s recruitment and retention problem — which in turn is impacting on the delivery of timely access to care for patients.
To hear Rob Landers discuss the issue with Damien Tiernan on Deise Today, listen back here:
