The acute hospital waiting lists in the Southern Health Board area since January 31st have shown a 31 per cent decline and a drop of 53 per cent if the figures are calculated for the past 22 months.
The figures, according to the chief executive of the SHB, Mr Seβn Hurley, show the waiting list crisis can be managed and that in the board's administrative area, which covers Cork and Kerry, the target of ensuring that no adult will wait longer than a year for treatment and no child longer than six months is achievable.
At the 600-bed Cork University Hospital (CUH) one of the major hospitals in the State, the in-patient waiting list in 1997 was 872, a figure which had grown to 1,107 by December 1999 but dropped significantly to just 537 people last month.
At Tralee General Hospital, the next biggest in the region, the comparison shows that the in-patient list peaked at 475 in 1999 and fell to 130 last month.
At St Mary's Orthopaedic Hospital in Cork, the waiting list figures for 1997 and 1998 exceeded the 700 mark but then began to drop, and last month the list had been reduced to 368 people.
In the Cork-Kerry region, there are now some 927 adults and 108 children on the waiting list.
The figures prove, Mr Hurley says, that despite criticism of health board managers in the most recent report published by the Government, effective strategies to combat and reduce waiting lists can be put in place and will work if there is adequate hands-on management and monitoring.
Mr Hurley said that until recently the top-down imperative from the Department of Health to the boards was to control budgets in an operating climate governed by lack of adequate resources. That placed an undue emphasis on administration, which was not necessarily good for efficiency or best practice, as health board managers struggled to keep costs within strict guidelines.
So why are the lists diminishing in the SHB region? The reason, he says, is that, two years ago, the SHB established a strategy and planning unit. Its aims were to use funding from the Government's waiting list initiative, established in 1999, to the best possible effect, to fill urgently-needed consultants' posts in urology, orthopaedics and plastic surgery, and to apply the extra funding to the problem as quickly as possible.
The board also decided to widen its communications horizons and engage in widespread and direct consultation with the people at whom its services were aimed.
An example of this was the Ageing with Confidence document produced by the strategy unit two years ago after hearing the views of elderly people throughout Cork and Kerry. But the key to it was the determination to manage the problem to the point where the waiting lists were beginning to come within more acceptable parameters.
"That is now happening, and I believe things will get even better and that we will reach the targets we have set ourselves," Mr Hurley said. "The criticism of health boards in the report, I think it only fair to point out, will have to be dealt with by the boards themselves, and I can speak only for the SHB which had already taken a strategic approach long before the release of the National Health Strategy."
Every year for the past decade the CUH had been the only acute hospital in the State to achieve a "positive adjustment", effectively a bonus, under the case-mix adjustment, the funding measurement used to determine how efficiently hospitals deliver their services.
Yet, despite the good news on waiting lists, for many patients in the A&E department of the CUH the pressure on the available services led to waiting times of up to three or four hours and longer, but on weekends it could take a minimum of five hours for patients to be seen.
However, within two years the hospital will have a new A&E unit. According to Mr Hurley there will be a vast improvement in services when the new £10 million building is opened. Within it will be a specialised chest clinic for people who need emergency care for suspected cardiac difficulties, and a minor injuries clinic, so that patients can be streamed even before arriving at the facility.