Covid-19 not to blame for ‘100-fold increase’ on waiting lists

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The Covid-19 pandemic is not to blame for the 100-fold increase in patient waiting lists, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) said.

The consultants call on the government to speed up the publication of a plan to fight the waiting lists of acute care hospitals before the publication of the latest figures for waiting lists of hospitals from the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF ), which are expected soon. They should show that 900,000 people are waiting for treatment under the fund.

The IHCA says wait lists have “gradually deteriorated over the past decade, despite claims from the HSE that the service had the resources to reduce these lists” before the Covid-19 pandemic hit .

The latest information available, as of May 2021, showed that more than 885,000 people were on some form of NTPF waiting list waiting to be treated or seen by a consultant at that time.

The number of people waiting for hospital and day care has increased by more than 31,000 over the past decade, an increase of 69%.

“More worryingly,” says the IHCA, there were 20,820 patients on these lists awaiting hospital care for over a year, more than 100 times more than 199 patients in 2012, and more than double the number at the end of December 2019, with 11,700 patients added since then alone.

Another 286,000 people are waiting on public hospital outpatient lists to be assessed due to “insufficient number of consultants and vacancies”, an 84% increase over seven years.

The IHCA says wait lists have “steadily deteriorated over the past decade, despite claims from the HSE that the service had the resources to reduce these lists” before the Covid-19 pandemic hit .

The IHCA says the situation is at the point where “we are not in an absolute crisis.

IHCA Vice President Professor Rob Landers said: “Government and health services must stop hiding behind the pandemic and cyber attack as the main reasons for our growing waiting lists.

“We need a multi-year budget from the Ministry of Health and develop a plan to address this problem once and for all.

The IHCA adds that the growing waiting lists demonstrate the impact of years of consultant shortages and underinvestment in capacity across the public hospital system.

The group says the government’s decision to “impose wage discrimination” on consultants taking contracts after 2021 is one of the root causes of the recruitment and retention problem in Ireland.

The short answer is that we need to invest very heavily in our health service, ”said Professor Landers.

“It won’t be easy or an overnight fix, but we have to start planning for it now.”

He added: The success of the ongoing discussions on the consultant contract will be critical to the survival of our health system for years to come.

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