One-quarter of State’s population on health waiting lists

At least 1.3 million people — one-quarter of the State’s population — are on some form of waiting list for health services, new figures show.

The figure includes more than 200,000 people waiting for treatments such as physiotherapy, dietetics or speech and language therapy, with 227,000 waiting for an X-ray, scan or other diagnostics.

In addition there are 897,000 people on various forms of hospital waiting lists, including 100,000 children.

The total number of people on waiting lists is more than 30 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels, while hospital waiting lists have grown by half since the Sláintecare report, which aims to eliminate them, was published in 2017.

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Last week marked the halfway-point of the 10-year Sláintecare reform plan for the health service but the Covid-19 pandemic and chronic staffing issues have ensured the goal of reducing waiting lists remains elusive.

Figures provided by the HSE to Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane show there are 1,325,180 people on the hospital, diagnostics and therapy waiting lists.

Many of 226,966 people on the therapy list are seeking assessment and, if approved, will have to wait on a new list for treatment. More than 60,000 have been on the list for more than a year.

[ More than 200,000 people on therapy waiting lists, figures show ]

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Clearing the backlog of untreated hospital patients could take up to 11 years, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has calculated.

“There has been a 54 per cent increase in people waiting on some form of hospital list since the plan was launched in 2017 — with almost 900,000 adults and children across the country in need of care, things are worryingly moving in the wrong direction,” said IHCA president Prof Alan Irvine.

“The reality is that Sláintecare waiting list targets are not achievable because public hospitals have a severe shortage of consultants, theatres, acute beds, diagnostic and other facilities.”

Although the Government has formulated a number of short-term action plans to reduce waiting lists, any progress made has been more than offset by Covid-induced cancellations of hospital appointments and procedures.

In April more than 14,000 non-urgent hospital appointments were cancelled, the Health Service Executive said.

More recently, elective work in hospitals has been disrupted by medical scientist strikes, while managers say high patient attendances in recent months have put many hospitals under extreme pressure.

Last Friday the HSE, responding to another week of record attendances at emergency departments, warned patients attending for non-urgent treatment to expect “very long waiting times” over the bank holiday weekend and into early this week.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 is beginning to put hospitals under renewed pressure with a 40 per cent rise in the number of hospitalised virus patients over the past week. ICU numbers remain stable and it is not yet clear the increased numbers in hospital is evidence of a fresh surge but test positivity — a key marker of the spread of infection — has also started to increase.

The first cases of a new Covid-19 variant of concern, BA.5, have been detected in Ireland, but there is no evidence yet of a wave of new subvariant cases. BA.5 and a related variant, BA.4, are more transmissible than the BA.2 subvariant that is dominant in Ireland.

There have been nine cases of the BA.4 sublineage and three BA.5 cases, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre reported last week, and 13 cases of another potentially concerning sublineage, XE.