CUH surgery move ‘crazy’ and ‘wrong’

Cork University Hospital (CUH) is firefighting on a number of fronts following revelations that a backlog of scans went unread in radiology and that elective surgery has been cancelled for two-weeks over Christmas.

Yesterday, Fianna Fáil party leader Micheál Martin described the decision to cease all elective surgery from December 22 to January 8 as “crazy” and “wrong” given the hospital has 1,500 people on its inpatient waiting list and 24,000 on its outpatient list.

“It’s shocking given that the lists are so high,” said Mr Martin.

“People are waiting too long for elective surgeries. In the tertiary centres, they are serious enough operations, and for people who were expecting to have surgery done, to get the news that it’s been cancelled, is very bad news. It just adds to the list.

“There is a real crisis in waiting times for patients and it’s a key benchmark in terms of the efficiency and quality of our health service, because surgical delays can lead to further complications — hopefully not in these cases — but it can, and it just adds to the delay for others coming on stream.”

Separately CUH claimed it has cleared a backlog of 2,466 scans that went unread due to staffing issues over the summer months, and which ultimately resulted in 14 patients being scheduled for recall.

The hospital said: “At this point, there are no cases of adverse outcomes from this review.”

The hospital said that, at the time of the staffing crisis, the decision was taken “to prioritise urgent workload and return to some of the less urgent outpatient work as circumstances allowed”.

It added that a team of radiologists had been paid to review the unread X-rays and the work was now complete.

The hospital said its Quality & Safety Office continues to monitor the situation.

In relation to the cancelled surgery, CUH posted a statement on its website yesterday saying the decision was “based on the learning from the post-Christmas period last year when a very large number of patients presented to the ED of which a large number required a surgical procedure”.

The hospital said: “It is always prudent to reduce elective non urgent operations to allow for the management of emergency cases in a safe and timely manner.”

The hospital’s executive management board originally proposed cancelling all elective surgery for three weeks, but scaled it back to two after it was met with “total resistance” from the surgeons and anaesthetists who make up the theatre operations management group.

Although the hospital told the Irish Examiner that the curtailment of surgery was “standard policy in all hospitals” to allow for a surge in trauma cases over Christmas, other hospitals contacted by this newspaper said that their elective surgery lists would not be disrupted, or that disruption would be limited to a couple of days.

Asked about the cancellations on RTÉ radio yesterday, Gerry McCarthy, consultant in emergency medicine at CUH, said they were linked to a project “examining patient flow through the hospital”.

Dr McCarthy, who is also the clinical lead of the HSE Emergency Medicine Programme, said he understood the cancellations will add to the hospital’s waiting list.

“Yes, unfortunately [it will add to the waiting list],” he said.

“I don’t know the precise number of how many surgeries have been cancelled, but it is one of the tools available in a crowded environment to cater for emergency admissions.”

The hospital has refused to disclose the number of surgeries affected by the two week cessation of elective procedures.