Arthritis sufferers’ agonising four-year wait for specialists

IRISH women have joined the one million women in Europe who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to demand urgent action on the poor services available for the incurable disease.

A chronic disease that causes the immune system to attack the joints, women are three to five times more likely to suffer from RA than men.

Sixty per cent of RA patients, meanwhile, are unable to work within ten years of the disease’s onset.

Representatives of arthritis organisations from throughout Europe met MEPs in the European Parliament, last week, to launch a campaign for better services — asking politicians to create a coherent European strategy to fight rheumatic diseases.

Services in Ireland are particularly bad, with patients waiting up to seven years to see a rheumatologist.

An estimated one in every six people in Ireland is affected by arthritis, including up to 5,000 children and 40,000 patients with severe inflammatory RA, according to Arthritis Ireland.

In the past ten years, great advances have been made in treating the disease, but these advances are of no consequence to many Irish patients — languishing for years on waiting lists.

Ireland has the lowest rate of rheumatologists per head of population in the EU, and, as a result, patients have to wait an average of a year to see a specialist — or four years in the west of Ireland. In some cases, the waiting time has been up to seven years, according to Arthritis Ireland.

Currently there is just one rheumatologist for every 400,000 people here, while the World Health Organisation recommends a minimum of one for every 65,000 people.

Over the past year, Arthritis Ireland has a postcard campaign to the Minister of Health Mary Harney demanding more rheumatologists, but, so far, there has been no increase.

The country’s 22 specialists divide their time evenly between treating arthritis and general medicine, meanwhile, so, there are, in fact, the equivalent of just 11 rheumatologists in the country at present.

Chief executive of Arthritis Ireland, John Church, said many are suffering in silence with little hope of seeing a rheumatologist.

Currently there are 400 people on the Galway waiting list, 100 of them urgent cases, facing up to four years wait for an appointment.

“It’s so important to have people seen early to prevent rapid onset and deterioration of the disease,” he said.

Robert Johnstone, president of Arthritis and Rheumatism International, who is in a wheelchair having got RA at the age of three, said the disease is the single greatest cause of physical disability in Europe, but admitted there were few reliable statistics.

“We believe one in four people are affected by RA in Europe and the disease costs the economy more than €200 billion a year. But we need to carry out detailed research,” he said.