Appointment times still intolerable for outpatients, writes Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent
Many may think the days when public patients had to wait years upon years to be seen in hospital by a medical specialist are over.
Certainly the waiting times to be admitted to hospital for surgery have been cut.
But there are two sets of hospital waiting lists: there is the one a patient goes on if their GP thinks they should be seen by a hospital consultant for a specialist's opinion in an outpatient department; and then there is the one a patient goes on after seeing their specialist if it is felt they need to be admitted to hospital for surgery or some other procedure.
The first are the outpatient lists; the second are the inpatient ones, the ones from which the very long waiters - those waiting several years - have disappeared.
But when it comes to outpatient waiting lists the very long waiters certainly have not disappeared. Figures published today by The Irish Times show patients across the State are still waiting many years to be seen in outpatients.
These could include patients with hip pain, waiting to see an orthopaedic specialist to see if they require a hip replacement operation. There are many patients at Letterkenny General Hospital, for example, waiting three years or more to see a consultant orthopaedic surgeon or rheumatologist.
Or they could include patients with bladder problems waiting to see a urologist to determine if their problem could actually be caused by prostate cancer. There are a number of patients on the outpatient waiting list at Mayo General Hospital since 1999 waiting to see a consultant urologist.
These are but a snapshot of outpatient waiting times at different hospitals as they existed at various stages last year or earlier this year. But the information is interesting because data in relation to outpatient waiting lists and waiting times has never been available before.
Outpatient waiting list data has never been published by the Health Service Executive or the Department of Health. And it's easy now to see why, from the intolerable lengths of time patients are having to wait.
The figures published today come from information released by hospitals under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI). Even getting the data via this route has been like pulling teeth in some cases. While a number of Dublin hospitals replied immediately to our FoI request, which was lodged in October 2006, some HSE areas have only replied to the request and released the information in the past few weeks.
And while not all hospitals have released information on their outpatient waiting lists, the 24 that did have close to 140,000 patients waiting.
Some hospitals with patients waiting for long periods stressed that these patients may have been given appointments in the past for which they couldn't or didn't turn up. Furthermore, they stressed that medical staff screen referring letters from GPs and identify whether a patient needs to be seen urgently, soon or routinely. The non-urgent cases are the ones likely to be waiting longest, but if a GP is wrong in his or her assessment about whether a patient needs to be seen quickly, a patient's condition could be allowed deteriorate while on an outpatient waiting list and the consequences could be fatal.
Stephen McMahon of the Irish Patients Association said he would be concerned about safety for patients waiting years to be seen, as well as about their quality of life as they wait. The numbers waiting for outpatient appointments, if all hospitals had provided data, was likely to be the equivalent of a packed Croke Park three times over, he said.
Dr James Reilly, Fine Gael's health spokesman, said it would be interesting to know how many people had died waiting.
In light of the new figures, it's not hard now to see why the 2007 Euro Health Consumer Index, published in October, ranked Ireland's healthcare system bottom of the league in Europe when it came to waiting times for patients to access services. Its main recommendation for Ireland was that it should first and foremost cut waiting lists, which, it said, "are still far too long".
Health minister Mary Harney has said she wants to appoint more consultants under a new contract to cut outpatient waiting lists, and the HSE stresses reducing outpatient waiting times will be one of its priorities in 2008.
If it doesn't address the appalling waiting times it's likely to be only a matter of time before legal actions are lodged by patients whose lives were put in jeopardy as a result of having been left waiting too long.