PUBLIC PATIENTS are being put at risk by having to wait four to five years for hospital outpatient appointments, the health watchdog has said.
At the publication of a report yesterday, which makes more than 20 recommendations around improving the tracking of GP referral letters within hospitals, the Health Information and Quality Authority said there was anecdotal evidence patients were waiting up to five years to be seen by orthopaedic specialists. International best practice indicates waiting times should be less than 90 days.
Through a consultation exercise with GPs and hospital doctors in one region, it said it was clear waiting times for outpatient and radiology services were “excessively long” and there were “unsafe delays experienced by patients in some cases”. It did not name the region.
Asked about the actual waiting times in that region, Prof Jane Grimson, director of health information with the authority, said the hospitals had not been asked for outpatient waiting list data as it became clear during the consultation process the data was not easily available or validated.
The Health Service Executive has refused to release outpatient waiting list data under the Freedom of Information Act; however, estimates put the numbers waiting at more than 200,000.
Prof Grimson said: “If we went and said to the hospitals or the HSE we want this data, they would be in a flap then trying to gather it together. And you know . . . we have an obligation not to be imposing an unnecessary bureaucratic burden on healthcare providers. We do have to take into account the cost to them of things we might ask them to do.”
She said if good IT systems were in place, this data would be easily available. The consultation process, she added, revealed problems around referrals “going missing or getting stuck in the system”, echoing what had happened at Dublin’s Tallaght hospital.
A report last year found 3,498 GP letters dating back to 2002 seeking appointments to see orthopaedic specialists at the hospital were not processed properly.
Hiqa's Report and Recommendations on Patient Referrals from General Practice to Outpatient and Radiology Servicesrecommends a standard template for when GPs refer patients to hospital to ensure patients can be prioritised appropriately. The template will now be piloted.
Prof Grimson said it was important GP referrals were managed centrally by hospitals and that a system of unique patient identifiers be legislated for to make tracking referrals easier.
The report recommends the health service develop a system to compile clear data on all referrals, documenting the time of receipt of the referral, the first outpatient appointment and the date of the delivery of a report on the appointment back to the GP.
This would feed into the work of the new special delivery unit set up by Minister for Health James Reilly to cut waiting lists.