More than 120,000 patients have been taken off hospital waiting lists without ever seeing a doctor, new data reveals.
Some 80,000 were removed last year and another 40,000 this year as part of a “validation” exercise on waiting lists, HSE figures show.
Galway University Hospitals (GUH) had the most actively validated lists, with the removal of more than 14,000 people awaiting outpatient appointments and more than 1,500 people who were due to undergo inpatient procedures.
At the Saolta hospital group, which includes GUH, more than 30,000 patients were removed from lists through validation since the start of 2021.
HSE guidelines say waiting lists should be validated by phone or letter at each stage of a patient’s “treatment pathway”. Patients should be afforded reasonable opportunity to respond to validation, it says, but can be removed from the waiting list if they do not respond within seven days. The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has, since 2018, operated a national centralised validation unit to check whether patients still require a procedure or appointment.
The figures were supplied by the HSE to Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane. He said that while validation was necessary, it should be referenced in the monthly data published by the NTPF. “A lot of the people coming off the lists is because of an effort (correctly) to validate the waiting lists as opposed to the HSE treating more patients.”
Meanwhile, the average waiting time to enter for admission to an emergency department (ED) is more than 11 hours, according to new figures.
For many hospitals in the State the wait is even longer. The two main hospitals in Cork, the Mercy University Hospital and Cork University Hospital, had the worst waiting times in the country during the month of May, at 21.6 and 19.6 hours respectively.
Tallaght University Hospital had a waiting time of 18.4 hours and at St Vincent’s Hospital it was 16.8 hours. Limerick was 14.7 hours, Sligo 14.3 hours and Beaumont Hospital in Dublin was 14.7 hours.
Just two hospitals in the State are fulfilling Sláintecare targets of ensuring two-thirds of those entering an ED are seen within six hours. St Luke’s in Kilkenny and Letterkenny were the only hospitals which were able to see more than two-thirds of ED admissions within six hours.
Thirteen hospitals in the State had not seen a third of emergency admissions within 12 hours.
