WAITING LISTS for public patients who need to be admitted to hospital for surgery may get longer in coming months while a new agency is drawing up a plan to cut waiting times, it was confirmed yesterday.
Minister for Health James Reilly said the initial focus of the new agency, the Special Delivery Unit (SDU), will be on reducing waiting times in hospital emergency departments and this could lead to some increase in inpatient waiting lists in the short term. However this would be under control within 12 to 18 months.
“It’s not our intention that waiting lists would rise, but I can’t outrule absolutely that happening in the short term,” he said.
His comments came as he announced the formal establishment of the SDU which will be headed by Dr Martin Connor, who had success in reducing waiting lists when he set up a similar unit in Northern Ireland. Dr Connor will be on a six-month contract and is to be paid €250,000.
He is due to have a plan drawn up by September on how to tackle waiting times in emergency departments, as well as inpatient and outpatient waiting lists. His pay will cover the cost of commissioning research.
No targets have yet been set for the unit and it will not get any additional exchequer funding. The resources of the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) will be at its disposal.
The NTPF, which arranges private treatment for public patients waiting over three months for operations, had a budget of €85 million this year and most of this is already spent or committed.
Dr Reilly stressed at a press conference that reports of the NTPFs demise had been “greatly exaggerated”. He said its role would change and it had been asked to cease commitments to further patients until the SDU was in place and it decided how best the resources allocated to cut waiting lists should be used. Some of the €30 million it has left will now be diverted to tackle waiting times in emergency departments.
“The last thing we wanted was all the money committed before the SDU got in place, and therefore [it] would have no resource then to effect changes in structures in a strategic fashion that might yield a much greater outcome for patients in terms of numbers treated,” Dr Reilly said.
He said the NTPF was committed to working three months in advance and this would continue. But it is not expected to accept new referrals over and above this until the plan is drawn up in September. The previous arrangement whereby the NTPF could only use 10 per cent of public hospital capacity to reduce waiting lists is also to be scrapped.
Latest HSE figures show there were more than 25,600 public patients – including adults and children – waiting more than three months for inpatient and day-case procedures at the end of March.
It is estimated another 200,000 are on outpatient waiting lists and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation said there were 409 patients on trolleys in emergency departments yesterday.
The Minister said Dr Connor’s unit in the North got 57,000 patients off waiting lists over an 18-month period at a cost of £36 million (€41 million). While waiting lists have recently risen again there, he said this was because Dr Connor had not been there for some time and there had been a change of health minister and underlying reforms were not undertaken.
“We don’t intend to repeat that error here,” Dr Reilly said.
Dr Connor said the SDU was “not a magic bullet”. It would act as a catalyst for change, he said, stressing it was possible to make significant improvements even at a time of constrained resources by doing things differently. He will look at improving IT systems to make the system accountable.
Dr Connor also joins the new interim board of the HSE and will report directly to Dr Reilly, who has reiterated his pre-election promise to “solve the waiting list crisis within three years”.