Up to 10,000 public patients will be offered private treatment by the end of next year, according to Ms Maureen Lynott, project director of the National Treatment Purchase Fund. The fund was set up under the National Health Strategy and pays for treatment in Ireland and the UK. Initially, it has €25 million to spend.
Treatment will be offered at first to adults who have spent more than one year and children who have spent more than six months on the waiting list.
About 9,400 adults and 2,000 children are in these categories, according to the waiting-list statistics. These figures are expected to fall when the fund removes "duplications", people who have been treated but not taken off the list and people who will shortly be treated publicly under the separate waiting-lists initiative. Some people will have grown too feeble for the treatment they were waiting for.
"I would expect we would," Ms Lynott replies when asked if by the end of next year the fund will have paid for treatment for those who at present have been waiting for treatment for longer than the specified periods. "I would be very surprised if we did not."
This would be achieved if the fund got co-operation from the health boards, the voluntary hospitals and consultants.
The fund will buy spare capacity in private hospitals. It is already paying for people to be treated in Dublin private hospitals and within the next two weeks will be paying for public patients to be treated throughout the State and in Northern Ireland.
It is in negotiations with two major private hospital groups in Britain. Ms Lynott estimates that 200 patients a month could be treated there. It is also in talks with private clinics in Northern Ireland. It has reached agreement with the North West Independent Clinic in Derry which has previously done contract work for the North Western Health Board.
Ms Lynott is confident the fund can find enough spare capacity in the private hospitals to meet its objectives. At the moment it is just getting under way and "this week we have more spare capacity than we can fill".
Patients being offered private treatment will be contacted in the first instance by their health board, she says.
"We are saying as a matter of principle that the way the fund would operate would not compromise or jeopardise the treatment of public patients in public hospitals".
The aim of the fund is to contribute to the reduction of public waiting lists to the point where it becomes redundant.
Most surgery performed in private hospitals is by consultants whose main employment is in a public hospital. Most of the patients treated by a consultant in a private hospital will not be from his or her own public waiting list, according to Ms Lynott. This is included in the fund's agreement with private hospitals.
Under the National Health Strategy no public patient who has seen a consultant and been put on the waiting list will spend more than three months on that list by the end of 2004.