Health boards urged to justify waiting list fund

HEALTH boards should be forced to give an estimate of the number of patients they will treat this year to justify the €31 million of taxpayers’ money they were given to tackle waiting lists, the Irish Patients Association said yesterday.

The call follows the revelation that health boards do not have to give details to the Department of Health on how many patients they plan to treat. In contrast, the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) which got a budget of €44m this year has set a target of 12,000 patients to treat abroad this year.

The Irish Patients Association (IPA) believe health boards, like the NTPF, should be forced to spell out how many patients they will treat for the Exchequer funding they get to tackle waiting lists. “The NTPF are totally transparent in the numbers they plan to treat with the Government funding. The same transparent rules should apply to health boards for a spend of €31m,” said Irish Patients Association chairman Stephen McMahon.

If both groups had to set specific targets, the public would have a benchmark which they could use to compare the effectiveness of both schemes, he said.

However, a Department of Health spokeswoman said, under the current system, there is no onus on the health boards to provide targets for the numbers of patients they will treat.

“It is up to each health board to decide how many patients they will treat with the money we give them, we can only hope that they give priority to those most in need,” a Department spokeswoman said.

Asked if there were any plans to change this, the spokeswoman said that each health board has executive powers to act independently with its budgets.

It also emerged yesterday the NTPF has treated 15,189 patients in hospitals abroad under the scheme since it was set up in July 2002. Their target for the end of this year is to provide patients with hospital treatment within three months of referral from the outpatients department. So far this year, just 37% of patients treated abroad had to wait between three and six months.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party revealed yesterday that only one third of the 60 public hospitals have kept within the target of keeping just 20% of their beds for private patients.

However, the Irish Hospitals Consultants Association (IHCA) challenged this figure yesterday and said that Labour Health spokes-person Liz McManus’ statement just focuses on activity levels in public hospitals - the number of public and private patients actually treated. But this does not show the true picture, because a greater number of public patients are elderly and spend longer in hospital. “On that basis we can conclude that it is possible to treat a greater number of private patients per bed than public patients,” said IHCA assistant secretary general Donal Duffy.