Hospital waiting-list figures issued by the Department of Health and Children last year were incorrect, it has emerged.
The correction of an error in the compilation of statistics by the Southern Health Board, which the Department says it was not told about, exaggerated the extent of the fall in the the number of people awaiting treatment.
But although the SHB, which appeared to have achieved dramatic cuts in hospital waiting lists in 2001, has admitted to The Irish Times that it had been miscounting patients for some time, it would not say for how long or how many patients were involved.
The SHB blames the inaccuracies on "a combination of procedural and software issues". Statistics are recorded using programs supplied by Keogh Software which is the biggest supplier of software to the SHB and whose products have been in use there for 10 years. Keogh says it was the health board's responsibility to check whether data were accurate.
The Department has now sought information from the SHB on the extent of the problem and says it is awaiting a reply.
During the election campaign the Minister for Health and Children referred to significant cuts in waiting lists in the SHB as evidence of progress in some areas of the health service. But although the SHB had confirmed in February that its statistics had been incorrect, the Department of Health and Children says it was not aware of this until contacted just over a week ago.
In December last the SHB was the State's star performer among health boards, cutting waiting lists by 28 per cent in 12 months. Indeed, the board itself had announced a 31 per cent cut in waiting lists for the first 10 months of the year.
In February the SHB told The Irish Times "due to a combination of procedural and software issues" patients who had been treated remained on the waiting list. "This has been corrected and all patients who have been treated have been removed from the waiting list," it said.
The Irish Times had asked if this correction of figures accounted for any of the reduction in waiting lists announced by the SHB in previous months. The SHB reply did not address this question.
The SHB's head of management services, Mr Jack Somers, said in April: "We are satisfied with the performance of the software and the company. We have not encountered any significant problems over the past 10 years."