HSE defends care of urgent cases

Patients who present urgently at hospitals through the outpatient or emergency departments are seen “reasonably quickly” despite long waiting lists, the head of the Health Service Executive said this morning.

Director general designate Tony O'Brien said the high numbers on outpatient waiting lists, 340,000 around the country, had been predicted by the Department of Health's special delivery unit earlier this year.

People may have had the impression numbers on outpatient waiting lists had "climbed dramatically" in the past few months following the release of figures yesterday, but this was not the case, he said. Numbers had risen because more hospitals had been included in the waiting list figures.

Up until earlier this year, the HSE had not published figures for those waiting for first appointments with hospital consultants in outpatient departments.

Since they began publishing the figures, they have been steadily growing as each hospital was included in the count.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio's Morning Ireland today, Mr O'Brien said while 340,000 people waiting was "way too many" and some people had been waiting "for far to long", the health service "can and will do much better" with proper organisation and more effective systems.

He said he was "very confident" that where referrals indicated urgency those patients were being seen urgently.

The aim now was also to ensure non-urgent cases would be seen in chronological order and "never again wait for indeterminate lengths of time".

"We have had dramatic reductions in the number of people waiting for more than 12 months," he said.

"People attending at emergency departments this year, while there is still significant room for improvement, are having a much better experience by and large than what happened before."