Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said she called for an overall audit of how waiting lists are managed “across the board in CHI [Children’s Health Ireland]” because it is one of her major concerns.
The move follows the controversy around a hospital consultant who allegedly breached HSE guidelines by referring patients he was seeing in his public practice to weekend clinics he was operating separately.
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has since suspended all funding for “insourcing arrangements” at the children’s hospital group.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Ms Carroll MacNeill said that as Minister she needed to ensure the public system was working in the most productive way “during the public hours that consultants are paid to do public work in a public hospital”.
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“What’s not acceptable and what the concern is here is that those procedures are not happening quickly enough or in [an efficient] way and that they’re becoming such long waiters that NTPF intervention is required,” Ms Carroll MacNeill said.
“Bernard Gloster and I have decided to have an overall audit of how are these waiting lists managed generally across the board in CHI in every discipline to ensure that that’s not being replicated.”
The Minister continued: “This is something where the NTPF absolutely need assurance that this is being done correctly, but what they also need is to make sure that there is no mismanagement of lists, such that a child is waiting so long that they are required to be on the NTPF list where there could have been an earlier surgical intervention.
The Minister said that there would also be a change whereby if a child was referred to a consultant surgeon, they would not be referred to an individual surgeon, but into a central referral mechanism. “Which means that the hospital can assess who has the shortest list, who has capacity to do this, rather than being sort of assigned to or stuck with an individual, who then has the capacity to do things at whatever pace,” Ms Carroll MacNeill said, adding that some work “very efficiently, and others less so”.
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The Minister said that she, along with the NTPF, Bernard Gloucester and CHI, need to make sure there are “no perverse practices or no perverse incentives from the way in which waiting lists are managed”.
“So I would ask parents to just sit with me, just for a week or 10 days, to allow the NTPF to get these assurances and to do their work,” Ms Carroll MacNeill said.
“The NTPF have already assured that existing surgery scheduled will not be impacted, but our concern is we need to make sure that this isn’t happening anywhere else in the system.”
Ms Carroll MacNeill acknowledged that the NTPF only recently discovered that there had not been a referral to the National Patient Safety Office.
“Let’s not underestimate the impact of that, nor was there a referral to the department or a notification to any of us. So that’s not a satisfactory way of managing that, and I expect that to be very, very different,” she said.
“There is no CHI without the State. The State is the funder of all of these services... everybody who is in CHI is a public servant, and it is important that they understand that.”
