Four-year wait for obesity surgery 

Just two centres in Ireland provide bariatric surgery to the public, which is leading to the long waiting lists. Picture: World Obesity Federation

The waiting list for a first appointment for potentially life-saving obesity surgery is now more than four years, it has emerged.

Helen Heneghan, professor of surgery and consultant bariatric surgeon at St Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, one of two centres in the country that provides bariatric surgery, has said a properly resourced obesity treatment programme is urgently needed.

Prof Heneghan said surgery was the most effective treatment for severe obesity.

"Demand, I suppose, is as high as the prevalence of obesity is in Ireland... one in four adults, one in five children," she said,

"So the prevalence of obesity runs into the hundreds of thousands if not well over a million people affected by the disease.” 

Prof Heneghan said while not everybody had the same severity of disease, about 80% of people with obesity will have a complication that affects their health in some way.

Those people would be eligible for obesity treatments — and they take many forms, from supervised lifestyle changes to obesity medications. Certainly, bariatric surgery, then, is the most effective treatment for severe obesity".

While hundreds of thousands of people currently meet eligibility requirements for the surgery, Prof Heneghan said “a lot of people don't even know that it exists as an effective and safe treatment, and how to access it.” 

Just two centres in Ireland provide bariatric surgery to the public, which is leading to the long waiting lists.

"They're too long because it's so difficult to access it, particularly in the public sector in Ireland," she told Newstalk radio.

"There's only two centres in Ireland that provide bariatric surgery to the public — Loughlinstown and St Vincent's University Hospital and there's a service in Galway, which actually isn't even resourced properly to deliver all of the elements of the multi-disciplinary care that patients require."

In St Vincents, Prof Heneghan said they were performing about 80 to 100 surgeries a year, which is nowhere near demand.

"There are over 2,600 patients waiting to get into our clinic at the moment. So the wait to get the first appointment is over four years."

She said if Ireland were to carry out 1,200 cases a year, it still would not bring us in line with the UK, which has the next lowest number of surgeries.

Prof Heneghan said obesity was “a very treatable disease” but a stigma attached to weight-gain could prevent people from coming forward.

"Weight stigma is prevalent throughout many aspects of society — many patients have an internal stigma where they won't even seek treatment for weight and for obesity.

They feel, in some respects, they're shamed, they've been taught and told that it's their fault for many, many years, and yet there's a wealth of science that tells us that that isn't the case, that it isn't people's fault.

"Obesity is a disease, a very treatable disease admittedly, but we can't control our weight just like we don't control our body temperature, we don't control our haemoglobin, our blood count [and] other things — it's involuntary."