Some 5,000 public patients on hospital outpatient waiting lists for lengthy periods are to be seen privately before the end of the year under a new initiative announced yesterday.
The patients, to be selected from 14 public hospitals, will be seen by hospital consultants in the private sector to whom they will be referred by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF).
Up to now the NTPF has only involved itself in arranging care for patients waiting long periods on inpatient waiting lists after they had already been seen in outpatients and a decision made that they needed to be admitted.
Outpatient waiting list figures have never been officially published but from figures made available by individual patients and former health boards, it has become clear patients can be waiting many years to be seen in outpatients after they are referred by their GP.
Data circulated to GPs in the southeast in 2003, for example, indicated patients were waiting up to seven years for their first outpatient appointment to see an ear, nose and throat specialist, and five years to see an orthopaedic surgeon.
At the publication of the NTPF's annual report yesterday, Minister for Health Mary Harney announced the plans to have the 5,000 patients waiting for outpatient appointments to be seen before the end of the year. If the pilot project is successful it is likely to be extended.
The project will cost €2.5 million and will be met from the NTPF's overall budget for the year of €64 million.
The fund's report for 2004 shows it arranged treatment for 13,627 public patients on inpatient waiting lists last year, at an average cost of €3,085 per procedure. Most of them underwent eye and ear procedures or general surgery. Since it was set up in 2002, the NTPF has arranged treatment for 30,000 patients. Over 1,500 of these have been treated in the North or in Britain.
Chief executive of the fund Patrick O'Byrne said all public patients who had been waiting years for inpatient treatment had now been seen. However two hospitals are still referring patients to the fund who have been waiting up to two years.
There was now no need, Mr O'Byrne stressed, for any public patient to wait more than three months for treatment in hospital. If they had been waiting longer than this they should contact the NTPF and it would arrange treatment for them privately, he said.
Ms Harney said the NTPF had been an outstanding success and it illustrated how progress could be made when people began to think outside the box.
The idea of the fund, she added, was that it would use spare capacity in the private sector but about 10 per cent of its work is being done in public hospitals. Some complex work could only be done in the public system, she said.
"I'm very keen to make sure that the public system would only be used in exceptional circumstances," she added.
The NTPF will publish its first waiting list figures for the main Dublin hospitals and St John's Hospital, Limerick, later this summer. Figures for other hospitals will be available at the latest by early next year.