Hospital waiting lists - Delays are a scandal

It would be unfair to the better class of Banana Republic to imagine they have hospital waiting times like those that were revealed yesterday.

The HSE reported that over 5,600 patients in Limerick are waiting four years or more for an outpatient appointment. Nationally, 105,632 patients were waiting over a year for a first consultant outpatient appointment.

This is a scandal and indicts all of those, managers or clinicians, involved. Equally, suggesting cutting waiting times to just a year as a solution shows an utterly unacceptable culture. The scandal also indicts each of us, especially politicians, because such an inefficient, dangerous system could only exist because we tolerate it. In these circumstances it is usual to invoke the “systems failure” mantra. What a load of tosh. These delays persist because some people are not doing their job. An appropriate response would be to give them the opportunity to join an entirely different kind of queue.