Patient data cards: A radical change in the management of hospital waiting lists as well as the type of data recorded will be announced by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) today.
The Irish Times has learned that the Minister for Health, Ms Harney, has approved a move to establish a patient register and away from a system of hospital waiting lists. No hospital waiting list data will be published from today. Instead, the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has begun preliminary work on the completion of a patient treatment register. This will record the patient's name and address as well as details of the treatment or procedure he is waiting for.
It will also record how long the patent has been waiting for treatment, starting from the time he or she is first seen in an hospital out patient department.
At the first outpatient visit, the patient will be given a credit card-sized card with contact details for the local hospitals as well as contact information for the NTPF. It will explicitly invite the patient to contact the NTPF once he has been waiting more than three months for treatment.
Sources have indicted that the patient register will be piloted in a number of hospitals from July next year. A national rollout of the new system is expected to take place in early 2006.
And in a significant move, if the patient accepts an offer from the NTPF to be treated in a private hospital here or in a healthcare facility abroad, he will be asked to return to his GP to initiate a new referral to the new hospital.
This is seen as a way of avoiding unnecessary delay; it will also make it less likely that a consultant, who was unable to treat a patient on his or her waiting list in the public system, would be paid for treating the same patient in a local private hospital.
It is believed the NTPF will also set up a website, readily accessible by both GPs and patients, that will record the typical waiting times for different procedures in different hospitals. Such information is part of healthcare systems in other countries.
"Waiting lists are lists of statistics, with a lot of duplication and they didn't tell you an awful lot," one source said last night. Since it was announced last May by the former Minister for Health, Mr Martin, that the NTPF would assume responsibility for the management of hospital waiting lists, it has been actively analysing the lists. It has concluded the present system is not uniform across all hospitals and that inclusion and exclusion criteria differ between institutions.
Asked whether the NTPF would consider recording data for the new register from the time of referral by a GP to a hospital, a source said such an extension would be considered in the future. At present, depending on the speciality, patients can wait up to three years before they are even assessed for the first time in an outpatient department.