Delays 'not acceptable', says Harney

THE MINISTER for Health Mary Harney has said it is not acceptable that patients have to endure long delays for tests to determine conditions such as bowel cancer. She was responding to figures in Saturday's Irish Timeswhich showed that some patients were waiting for up to 18 months for a colonoscopy examination at Portlaoise General Hospital.

They were waiting up to 12 months for the test at other hospitals.

"It's not acceptable to me and it's not acceptable to the cancer control programme that patients would have to wait for such long periods before they get their initial diagnosis, because we know with cancer in particular, early diagnosis is very important if we are to get good outcomes," Ms Harney said yesterday.

However, the Minister was criticised by Fine Gael's health spokesman, Dr James Reilly, for behaving like "a spectator" instead of the Minister in charge of health. Meanwhile, Labour's Jan O'Sullivan said the Minister's comments were "unbelievably hypocritical".

Ms Harney was speaking at an event to mark the 100,000th patient to have used the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) since it was set up in 2002. The NTPF arranges for patients who have been waiting longest in public hospitals for routine procedures to be treated in private hospitals. The majority of operations involve ophthalmology and ear, nose, throat and general surgery.

Ms Harney criticised hospitals with long waiting lists which were still failing to refer patients to the NTPF. The fund's chief executive, Pat O'Byrne, said hospitals in Letterkenny, Sligo and Tallaght had the longest waiting lists and the NTPF was writing to patients in these hospitals to offer them treatment.

More than half of the 4,000 adult patients waiting for procedures for more than 12 months are waiting at these three hospitals. Since January, the NTPF has written to 2,200 patients in these hospitals offering them treatment privately.

The NTPF's 100,000th patient was Catherine Kennedy, a mother of eight from Clara, Co Offaly. She was told that she would be waiting two years for a spinal decompression operation in Beaumont hospital.

She applied to the NTPF and had the operation in the Blackrock Clinic six months after being placed on the public hospital waiting list.

"From the moment I rang those people I had to do no more work. It was done for me - an absolutely outstanding service," she said.Her husband, Brendan, had a triple bypass in 2004 under the scheme.

In 2002, Maureen Watson from Tallaght was waiting for a gallstone operation for four and a half years when she was contacted by the NTPF and asked if she would be the first patient on its books. Her operation was carried out less than a week later.

The NTPF organised 1,920 operations in that first year but expects to look after more than 37,000 public patients this year. Average waiting times for the most common operations is now two to five months. The NTPF is also running a pilot scheme to reduce outpatient waiting lists and organised 10,500 appointments last year.

Ms Harney was asked yesterday why Ann-Marie Kelleher (12) could not have benefited from the NTPF earlier. Her spinal surgery was cancelled several times before she got approval for an operation next month in Britain. "There were clinical issues [in that case]. The National Treatment Purchase Fund will not provide treatment to somebody unless it's clinically directed," Ms Harney said.