The Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, has promised to fight for additional funds to shorten hospital waiting lists in the coming Estimates campaign.
Addressing the annual conference of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association in Galway, Mr Cowen said the pressure on hospital beds had to be dealt with, and if the status quo was maintained there was the prospect of ever-increasing waiting lists. However, he gave no definite indication that the additional money would be found.
"This will require extra resources, and it is my job to try and get it during the Estimates campaign," he told consultants.
Mr Cowen said the expert group he had set up to examine the causes for the increasing waiting lists had provided a comprehensive overview, showing that the solution was inter-dependent between all parts of the system.
"When you get down to it, what the patients wants to know is how long it will take to get a procedure done. That is what is important," the Minister said.
In his address the IHCA president, Dr David Lillis, said the practice of simply allocating money to shorten waiting lists did not work.
Over the past few years £62 million had been devoted to waiting list initiatives, and a further £12 million this year alone. This approach, he said, had been "driven mainly by a political imperative of successive governments: long waiting lists are bad PR for any government.
"As experience is showing us, it does not work. It is much the same as a doctor applying a tourniquet to a badly haemorrhaging cut. The effect is temporary and the wound will bleed again until the fundamental causes are addressed and treated," the Galway consultant paediatrician said.
At any one time, he said, more than 1 per cent of the population was languishing on waiting lists, and inevitably the condition of some patients' worsened or some died awaiting treatment that might have saved their lives.
"The creation of waiting lists in themselves defers spending. It is when patients die on waiting lists that money is actually saved."
Dr Lillis said the very minimum increase needed in health spending next year was 10 per cent, or £300 million. A 4 per cent limit on the increase in health spending in the Budget would only add further to the crisis in the hospital services, he said.
The £300 million was required for a £50 million investment to establish a modern child-care service; £10 million additional spending on care of, and services for, the elderly; the development of hospital infrastructure and services; and seriously addressing the crisis in waiting lists.
He called for an action plan on the problem of summer bed closures which exacerbated the difficulties of clearing waiting-list backlog during the slacker months.
The root cause of most of the problems in the health services and hospitals was simple, a lack of commitment by successive governments over the past decade to properly fund and resource health services, he said. In the table of per-capita spending on health among OECD countries, Ireland came near the bottom, just ahead of Portugal and Greece, he said.