GP REACTION:THE IRISH College of General Practitioners has called for an investigation into the backlog of GP referral letters at Tallaght hospital.
Chairman of the group, Dr Mel Bates, said Minister for Health Mary Harney and the Health Service Executive should investigate the full details of the backlog.
“The college is shocked to hear of the revelations and we are awaiting the hard facts. The college would welcome an investigation to iron out the facts of this case.”
He said if the referrals were “parked” because of long waiting times, there were better ways of dealing with that. In the past GPs had been approached and were asked to stop referring patients to certain clinics to “give people a breather” and time to deal with the backlog. “That is a more honest way of doing it.”
He said the college was keen that the time between a referral letter entering the hospital and being signed off by a consultant was the shortest possible.
Dr Bates said he personally had not experienced major issues with referrals locally, and GPs tended to complain more about the frustrations of waiting times for outpatients than of letters not being dealt with.
However, other GPs say they have experienced problems. Monaghan GP Dr Illona Duffy said issues around delays in dealing with GP referral letters was a national problem. “It’s symptomatic of the extra demands being made on hospitals throughout the country without resources.”
She said two years ago she sent a letter to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda requesting an urgent orthopaedic appointment for a patient. After three weeks the patient had received no appointment so Dr Duffy rang the hospital and was told no referral had been received. When she insisted the referral had been posted and faxed, the hospital said the letter was “in the box”.
“I asked ‘what box?’ and they said this was a box all GP referral letters were being put into because the waiting list was too long and they had been told not to add any new names to it.”
Lucan GP Dr Tony Feeney said he believed up to 20 per cent of GP referral letters got lost. At the practice where he worked patients were asked to track their referrals and contact the practice if they do not here from the hospital within three weeks.
He called for a system of acknowledgement of GP letters to be put in place in all hospitals.
Dr Aodhagan O’Reilly, a GP in Tallaght, said local doctors had raised the problems with the hospital on a number of occasions.
He said a patient referred to the orthopaedic department in 2004 has never received a reply.
And a man referred with severe arthritis in his hip in 2006 and again in 2008 only received a query about his status in 2010. In the meantime, he had his hip replaced at Blanchardstown hospital.