Surgeons unable to access operating theatres for up to a year due to support staff shortages

Ireland has 211 operating theatres — one third of the equivalent number in other western European countries, according to the IHCA.

Highly trained surgeons are unable to access operating theatres for up to a year due to a shortage of support staff and a failure to allocate patients, a leading doctors’ association has revealed.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) is calling for significant capital funding to open operating theatres, buy equipment, and recruit a wide range of support staff to ensure surgeons can work to clear waiting lists.

The consultants’ body has also raised serious reservations about proposals to build elective hospitals in locations around the country as part of a plan to alleviate pressure on the acute hospital system.

To illustrate the lack of a coherent recruitment strategy, IHCA president Alan Irvine revealed that a surgical oncologist was appointed without access to an operating list or to an outpatient clinic — a situation he said happens regularly.

“Frequently, we are now appointing people and they are not being allowed operating time, or clinic lists, or secretarial support,” he said.

“People get appointed, they turn up for work, and they don’t have outpatient space. They don’t have secretarial support, they don’t have an operating list. If you don’t have an operating list in theatre, you don’t operate. It’s as simple as that.”

Ireland has 211 operating theatres — one third of the equivalent number in other western European countries, according to the IHCA.

The health service also has 108 doctors working in an area of medicine outside their specialist training.

“We feel very strongly that’s a patient safety issue,” said Prof Irvine.

He warned that even if hospitals ramp up to higher efficiency rates than in 2019, it could still take 15 years to treat people currently on waiting lists.

IHCA president Alan Irvine revealed that a surgical oncologist was appointed without access to an operating list or to an outpatient clinic — a situation he said happens regularly.

This is despite the launch of a Government action plan, funded to the tune of €350m, in February of this year.

A key strand of the plan, to build elective hospitals in Cork, Galway, and Dublin, will not address growing waiting lists, said IHCA vice-president Rob Landers.

“The Sláintecare plan does propose three elective hospitals. That’s not a concept that we support, quite frankly. It isn’t going to work,” he said.

“It’s going to be very difficult to build elective hospitals at that scale. The State doesn’t have a good track record of building hospitals. We are also concerned about the type of procedure that will be provided in those hospitals.”

Prof Landers also raised concerns about the geographic inequity of the proposals.

“We would instead propose the Government looks at increasing elective capacity in existing sites,” he said, adding that finding doctors to run these hospitals will be challenging.

The IHCA said qualified consultants are regularly turning down jobs in hospitals because of persistent problems within the system and the ongoing pay disparity between doctors hired before 2012 and more recent hires.

There are now 882 consultant roles either vacant or filled on a temporary basis within the health system.

“That is an extraordinary figure,” said Prof Irvine.

“Competition for consultant posts was crazy, there were five or six applicants for posts everywhere in the country.

“Now there are lots of posts advertised and nobody applies, or people who apply are not suitable.”

Last year, a snapshot of these vacancies across political constituencies found that in Cork North West, 40% of consultant roles were vacant or filled by a locum doctor, and 33.3% in Cork South West.

There was a 23.1% vacancy rate in Cork North Central and 12.5% in Cork East.

Across Kerry, 35% of consultants’ jobs were not permanently filled, and in Limerick City, this stood at 34%, the IHCA highlighted. Waterford faced a 28.4% vacancy rate.