Sir, – I welcome the reported comments of Minister of State at the Department of Health Róisín Shortall (HEALTHplus, January 3rd) urging the publication of hospital waiting list times with a view to facilitating GPs’ referral of patients to where they can be seen the soonest.
It is a very sensible approach that has been long advocated by us general practitioners.
However, as she is relatively new in the job she is clearly not up to speed on the Machiavellian and capricious nature of the HSE senior administration.
This dysfunctional management is increasingly promoting a system where GPs are finding it more difficult to have our patient referrals accepted by hospitals. We are finding that both local HSE and also hospital administrators are regarding patients as statistics and arbitrarily deciding to draw lines on a map, causing a post-code lottery for healthcare access. Administrators are sending back referral letters to GPs when they deem that the patient is not living in a certain catchment area.
Recently I have found that the wait for speech therapy for children in the community in Dublin 14 is three to four months while in neighbouring and less affluent Dublin 24 it is 18-21 months. This is a result of equal resources being allocated to similar populations but with different need profiles.
The wait for a routine dermatology appointment is about four to five months for St James Hospital if you are lucky enough to live in the north side of Walkinstown, but it is over two years for AMNCH if you are on the south side of Walkinstown. There is a similar discrepancy with rheumatology referrals. Both these cases are as a result of unequal allocation of resources in comparison to catchment populations.
This results in glaring inequities that nobody seems to be taking responsibility for and there is an increased risk of delayed diagnosis with associated ensuing consequences if referral letters are being bounced around unnecessarily.
GPs, with our nursing and administrative staff, are working hard to provide a patient-centred, holistic and cost effective professional service to all, irrespective of their background, medical card status or address.
We wish that the HSE senior management would consider a similar policy. – Yours, etc,