Minister for Health Mary Harney has expressed disappointment that some hospitals and consultants are not referring patients to the special fund set up to tackle surgical waiting lists.
Speaking at the publication of the National Treatment Purchase Fund's (NTPF) annual report today, Ms Harney said it may now be necessary for the fund to liaise directly with general practitioners.
Minister for Health Mary Harney
The NTPF was set up four years ago to cut waiting times for surgical procedures by using spare capacity in the private health sector here and abroad. Patients waiting more than three months for a procedure can contact the fund and have treatment arranged either in Ireland or elsewhere.
Patients are now waiting between two and five months for the most common surgical procedures, compared to between two and five years in 2002.
Last year, the NTPF arranged treatment for 18,197 patients and had a total budget of €64 million.
Some 95 per cent of those patients were treated in Ireland, while the remainder were treated in Northern Ireland, Britain and the United States.
"It's disappointing that there are some hospitals that are not making referrals, and I think now there is an obligation on the National Treatment Purchase Fund to try and work with those hospitals to try and change that situation," Ms Harney said.
She said there were huge shortages in the number of consultants in the public healthcare system and that this also had to be addressed.
"We should have about 4,000, and we have 2,000, and we have 4,000 non-consultant hospital doctors, and we should have 2,000. There's no doubt they are real issues, and that's why a new contract of employment is very important in order to employ those consultants. I think this year we will probably employ about 100 additional consultants in the healthcare system and obviously that will greatly help in certain areas.
"But until we get to a situation where we have the consultant services we require at a regional level and in all specialties within the region to provide a service we are always going to have delays and difficulties," Ms Harney said.
"I think the private sector has the capacity here as we have established now through the fund to be able to treat those patients and to make the services available to those patients."
Ms Harney noted that the hospitals that aren't referring patients to the NTPF are also the hospitals "with the biggest problem as far as A&E is concerned".
Mary Harney
The reasons for that were different, she said. For example, some hospitals in the Dublin area had issues regarding the discharge of patients, while others, such as Letterkenny and Wexford, had capacity problems.
The Health Service Executive was now working on a hospital-by-hospital basis to address this issue, she said.
The top procedures performed under the NTPF were cataract removals (2,256), procedure scopes (1,378), tonsillectomies (1,351), varicose vein removal (916) and joint replacements (976), as well as cardiac surgery (1,105) and the removal of skin lesions (383).
The Patient Treatment Register was also established by the NTPF last year to collate waiting list data from hospitals for the first time. Some 19 hospitals covering 74 per cent of the population are now covered by the register, and all targeted hospitals will be covered by the end of this year.
NTPF chief executive Pat O'Byrne said that by the end of the year the fund aimed to have treated over 60,000 patients.