Analysis: The national treatment fund has made inroads into waiting lists, writes Eithne Donnellan
What every patient wants to know when their doctor tells them they need surgery is when will they have it and how long will they have to wait.
For years public patients' wait on hospital lists for surgery seemed endless. Waiting seven and eight years for operations was not unheard of. Then the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) was established. Since 2002 it has removed 35,000 public patients, many of whom were waiting years for surgery, from hospital lists across the State by arranging to have them treated privately.
Although many have questioned the wisdom of a system where public money goes into the private system rather than improving the public one, it has undoubtedly successfully made inroads into waiting lists and removed many of those waiting the longest from them. Last year it was given responsibility for collating all hospital waiting-list data as figures up to that had been compiled in different ways by the hospitals. When patients on lists drawn up by hospitals were contacted by the NTPF they were sometimes found to have been treated elsewhere, had moved away or had died.
Yesterday the NTPF published it standardised data on surgical and medical waiting times at seven hospitals, including the five main Dublin teaching hospitals.
The data is on a new national patient treatment register which is accessible to patients, GPs, and hospitals, to check waiting times for procedures at different locations.
The NTPF said yesterday the register at www.ntpf.ie or www.ptr.ie empowered patients. Now if their GP recommended surgery, they could look at the website and see the hospital which had the shortest waiting time for the surgery they required, and ask to be referred there. However, if the site said the waiting time to have a cataract removed at a chosen hospital is two months, the patient will be disappointed if he or she expects to wait only that length. This is because the patient will have to be referred first by their GP to a consultant, for whom waiting times can be months, even years.
Liam Twomey, Fine Gael's health spokesman, said in his experience it takes up to three years to get an ENT (ear, nose & throat) outpatient appointment and up to four years to get a routine orthopaedics outpatient appointment.
The NTPF is now looking at ways of reducing outpatient waiting times but until it does, time spent waiting to get on a waiting list will continue to be unacceptable.
On a positive note, under the new system, once a consultant sees a patient and recommends surgery the patient will immediately be put on a waiting list. In the past patients were for some inexplicable reason not put on waiting lists until they had been waiting for three months.
Also under the new system the NTPF will have access to the names and addresses of patients on waiting lists and if they are waiting more than three months for surgery, the NTPF will contact them directly to offer private treatment. Previously it depended on hospitals to refer those waiting the longest and not all rushed to do so.
Most attention will focus, however, on the fact that 2,000 patients at seven hospitals are waiting more than 12 months for surgical and medical treatment, something which exposes Government promises for what they were - just promises. Fianna Fáil made a pre-election promise in 2002 to eliminate waiting lists in two years and the 2001 National Health Strategy promised no patient would wait more than three months by the end of 2004.
