Three-year wait to join surgery waiting list

HIP surgery patients face a delay of three years just to get onto a waiting list for treatment at one of the country’s largest hospitals, where consultants are dealing with a work-load three times the recommended level.

Public orthopaedic patients are currently advised that once they are referred to consultants at Cork University Hospital it will be 36 months before they can expect to get an appointment.

Irish Patients’ Association chairman Stephen McMahon said the figures reveal a problem endured by outpatients around the country.

“Public patients are waiting too long just to get an initial appointment with a consultant,” he said.

“While there are only anecdotal figures from around the country there certainly seem to be substantial waiting times in some areas in particular.

“Now that patients are beginning to get more timely treatment (under the National Treatment Purchase Fund NTPF) the next stage is to cut the waiting times to get on that list in the first place.”

The delays came to light when the Health Service Executive South was asked to report on the status of two patients sent to consultants at CUH by their GPs.

Responding to the figures, the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association (IHCA) hit out at chronic under-staffing in orthopaedics and a failure to improve services at CUH for the past 20 years.

Donal Duffy, assistant secretary general of the IHCA, said best practice dictates one orthopaedic surgeon for every 30,000 people but in Cork each consultant has a catchment population of 100,000.

He said: “The situation in Cork has been going on now for the past 20 years.

“There is still the same facilities and level of service that there was at the time of the cutbacks in the 1980s.”

Cork Fine Gael Deputy David Stanton said two of his constituents have been told to expect similarly long delays which he described as “appalling” and he called for full disclosure on the initial waiting times for all elective consultations.

“We have had the NTPF for the past two years and that is okay but this is a whole hidden area where people are waiting just to be eligible for the NTPF.

“In the main (hip replacement patients) are people in their 60s and 70s. These people are in pain and they are suffering for all the time they are waiting to be treated,” he said.

Tony McNamara, general manager of the Cork University Hospital Group, said the waiting times were due to the large number of referrals and urgent cases were routinely bumped up the list. “We are in the process of referring 300 patients to the NTPF and as part of this process the orthopaedic waiting list is being validated to ascertain the true waiting times,” he said.

Liz Shannon, Project Officer for the National Patient Register, said: “I would be pitching that the patient register be extended to look at bringing down overall wait times because it seems like the obvious extension.”