Hospitals which fail to refer patients to the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) could face financial penalties, it was confirmed today.
The warning was issued by the Minister for Health Mary Harney when it emerged there are still 2,155 public patients waiting over a year for surgery.
Latest figures from the NTPF indicate there are over 21,400 public patients waiting for treatment at hospitals across the State.
Ms Harney said there was no excuse for hospitals not to refer patients to the fund.
At the launch of the NTPF's annual report for 2007 in Dublin today, the chairman of the fund John O'Dwyer said over half the patients waiting over 12 months for treatment now are on waiting lists at a handful of hospitals.
These hospitals include Letterkenny and Sligo General Hospitals, Tallaght Hospital, Tullamore General Hospital and Cork University Hospital.
Mr O'Dwyer said he was "not happy at all" that there were still over 2,000 patients waiting over a year for treatment and the aim of the NTPF was to bring this number to zero by the end of the year.
He urged the hospitals not referring long waiters to the fund to do so now.
The NTPF was set up in 2002 to buy treatment in private hospitals for patients waiting several months for their operations.
It has to date arranged private treated for over 110,000 patients but not all public hospitals are proactively referring patients waiting months for treatment to the fund.
Ms Harney said there was no excuse for hospitals not to refer patients to the fund.
She said the idea for the NTPF came from Norway where hospitals are obliged by statute to refer patients to it. She has not ruled out going down this road here if hospitals continue to fail to refer patients to the fund.
However she said in the first instance this year the HSE will use rates at which hospitals refer patients to the fund as a key performance indicator, which will be used to feed into the funding hospitals receive.
Funding would be matched with performance, she said.
Pat O'Byrne, chief executive of the NTPF, said the fund had made huge progress in reducing waiting lists and waiting times for patients. He said the average waiting times in 2002 when the fund was established were two to five years and now they were two to five months.
Fine Gael's Dr James Reilly said the patients on waiting lists had been betrayed by the Government.
"No wonder nobody trusts this Government," he said. "The Health Minister has described today's figures as 'inexcusable'. For once she's right.
"And the buck stops with her and her Government who squandered the boom and are now looking at cutbacks that will undoubtedly hit the most vulnerable."
Labour's spokeswoman on health Jan O'Sullivan said the waiting list figures were unacceptable. She claimed targets set in 2002 to reduce waiting lists had been "spectacularly missed" and problems continue to beset the Health Service Exeutive.
"Thanks to Mary Harney's ideological commitment to for-profit medicine, we are in danger of moving to a situation where only those who can afford to pay, get the best attention, while those who cannot, end up on waiting lists", she said.
Sinn Féin's health and children spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin accused Ms Harney of playing "Pontius Pilate" with waiting list figures.
"Mary Harney in her response to these figures is playing the role of Pontius Pilate. She tries to wash her hands of her responsibility and pin the blame on the hospitals for allegedly not referring patients for treatment through the National Treatment Purchase Fund," he said.
"The reality is that the National Treatment Purchase Fund cannot compensate for the shortage of hospital beds and the shortage of front-line staff in our public hospital system, a situation worsened by the HSE ban on recruitment," he added.