Hospital scan scheme paused due to 'unprecedented demand' 

The IHCA says some hospitals are cancelling plans to send patients for private scans. Picture: File

A scheme allowing public patients to have vital scans privately, including for cancer, has been paused due to “unprecedented demand”, despite overall waiting lists of 260,000 people.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) said that some hospitals are now having to cancel arrangements to send patients for a private scan.

The scheme had also been reducing the numbers of patients attending busy hospital emergency departments for a scan.

The funding, provided by the National Treatment Purchase Fund, gives hospital outpatient departments greater access to diagnostics and has been in place since 2020.

However 79% of this year’s allocation had, according to IHCA, already been used by the end of February, with 55,000 vouchers for radiology scans issued to hospitals as emergency diagnostic authorisation numbers (EDANs). 

IHCA president Professor Rob Landers said they are “extremely concerned” at this move.

The high number of people waiting for procedures such as CTs, MRIs, and ultrasounds is especially concerning given that these diagnostic tests are used to either confirm or rule out a disease or condition, including cancer.

"Failure to provide outpatient radiology will also lead to increased acute patient presentations to emergency departments and longer lengths of stay in hospital in order to get scans completed.” 

“At the end of February, the fund informed the HSE it was unable to issue any new diagnostic vouchers to hospitals despite requests coming in for them, and that no new initiatives would be approved for 2024,” the IHCA said.

IHCA president Prof Rob Landers said they are 'extremely concerned' at the move. Picture: ihca.ie

“At the time, it is understood some hospitals had already exceeded their EDAN voucher allocations for certain types of scans and were in the process of ‘retracting’ a number of arranged scans for patients that were due to be carried out by private providers.” 

On April 4, Fiona Brady, CEO of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, wrote to the IHCA after it raised concerns.

“The demand in 2024 to date has been unprecedented. As a result, a large proportion of this allocation has now been claimed and utilised by public hospitals,” she said in the letter, shared with the Irish Examiner by the IHCA.

The NTPF must remain within its budget, she added.

“Due to the demand in the first three months of the year, a temporary pause has been placed on the routine issuing of EDANs while additional funding is being sought by the HSE. In the intervening period, we are working with HSE Acute Operations to issue more EDANs to hospitals in urgent need,” she said.

A separate scheme, GP Access to Community Diagnostics, funds GPs to send their patients for private scans and tests.

It emerged recently that the HSE had concerns around how this scheme is being used. Last night, a spokeswoman said some tests are being over-used, with far more scans than laboratory tests being done.

While they are not putting a limit on the number of tests or scans a GP can order, she said, “we are therefore rebalancing the activity between imaging and tests, with an expected end-of-year activity of 530k made up of 260k tests and 270k imaging".