Hospital waiting lists will take more than a decade to clear – IHCA

Irish Hospital Consultants Association vice president Professor Gabrielle Colleran. The waiting list reduction plan, launched just two weeks ago, 'has already fallen at the first hurdle'. Picture: ihca.ie

The current levels of Ireland’s medical waiting lists will take more than a decade to clear, according to the body representing hospital consultants.

New waiting list figures for Ireland’s hospitals published by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) show a slight increase on February’s numbers, with more than 896,000 people on some sort of public hospital waiting list.

The Department of Health noted the new figures, which it said represent a drop of 3.2% in terms of people whose wait time has exceeded the 10 and 12-week appointment targets mandated under Sláintecare, the cross-party plan agreed in 2017 for the reform of the Irish health service.

However, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) was sharply critical of the trends the figures represent, with the organisation’s vice president Gabrielle Colleran saying that lowered Government targets for reducing the numbers “may take a decade or more to get under control unless the opening of long-promised additional hospital capacity is fast-tracked".

Missed targets

The IHCA claimed the new figures show that the Government’s latest plan for reducing waiting lists, launched just two weeks ago, “has already fallen at the first hurdle”.

That plan had set a new reduction target for waiting lists of 6%, or 39,300, by the end of 2024, compared with the previous targets set by 2022 and 2023 of 18% and 10% respectively.

Both of those targets had also been missed by a distance, with reductions of just 4% and 3% achieved respectively.

Waiting lists got longer 

However, per the new figures, the three main waiting lists for hospital appointments and treatments have in fact increased by 24,300 in the first three months of 2024.

The IHCA noted that the decrease achieved in 2023 had been heavily dependent on some 129,000 people being removed from lists via NTPF’s validation programme, which sees people not responding, or answering in the negative, to mail prompts querying whether or not they still require treatment being removed from the lists.

A further 129,000 people have been targeted for removal from lists in 2024 as part of this year’s version of that validation programme.

'Time for a different approach'

Meanwhile, Professor Colleran said that, while the IHCA “welcome any funding which aims to cut these unacceptably long waiting lists”, it could be “time the Government takes a different approach, if it is doing the same thing over and over again and still expecting to get different results”.

She said that the new numbers “confirm” the “grave concerns” of consultants that waiting lists as they stand will take more than 10 years to clear to an acceptable level unless additional hospital capacity is “fast-tracked” together with the simultaneous filling of the one in five vacant consultant posts currently seen in Irish hospitals.

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She added the IHCA is nevertheless “not confident” that the Government’s new plan “will adequately address the fundamental issue of the overwhelming shortage of acute hospital beds, outpatient facilities, theatres, diagnostics and other frontline resources required to bring these unacceptable waiting lists down”.