Eithne Donnellan,
Health Correspondent
Data provided by health boards on the numbers of operations they carried out under a special initiative to reduce hospital waiting lists could not be relied on, the Comptroller and Auditor General said yesterday.
Mr John Purcell told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee that when the Mid Western Health Board was asked how many people it treated under the Waiting List Initiative (WLI) in the year 2000, it gave two different figures at different times. It said in 2002 that it had treated 991 people but this month it said it had actually treated 1,724.
The Midland Health Board, he said, also gave two different figures for the numbers it treated. It said in 2002 that the number it treated in 2000 was 867 and this month it put the figure at closer to 500.
Mr Purcell made his comments after Mr Sean Fleming TD asked why there were no figures in the report on WLI spending for the number of procedures carried out for the money allocated.
Mr Purcell's report, published in November, found almost half the money allocated to health boards to reduce hospital waiting lists under the WLI in 2002 was spent on employing staff.
It also found that while the money was supposed to be ring-fenced for patients waiting longest in a number of target specialities, it had become part of core hospital funding.
Some €172 million was allocated to the initiative during the five-year period from 1998 to 2002 reviewed by Mr Purcell.
Asked by Mr Fleming if the taxpayer had got value for money, Mr Purcell said: "Of course, better value could have been achieved". He said there was a lack of traceability in the hospitals visited as to how the money was spent.
The chief executive of the Eastern Regional Health Authority, Mr Michael Lyons, told the committee he stood over figures for the number of procedures carried out under the initiative in his region. He said 13,278 procedures were carried out for a sum of €49 million in 2001 and 2002. This means the annual cost per procedure was almost €3,700.
Meanwhile, Mr Pat O'Byrne, chief executive of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, which will handle all waiting-list funding in future, said it had treated 10,500 patients to date for €32 million, bringing its average patient care costs in at just over €3,000.
The secretary general of the Department of Health, Mr Michael Kelly, contended that, since the WLI was introduced, many thousands of patients had had elective treatments more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.