Waiting times for every health Trust:

PATIENTS with cancer are among those spending years waiting for a first outpatient appointment, a leading surgeon has warned.

Gary Spence from the Royal College of Surgeons in Northern Ireland said the situation here has deteriorated to the point that medics are largely only able to deal with emergency cases and are cynical that it can ever be fully addressed.

Mr Spence said: “You feel like a little boy and there’s a hole in the dyke and you have your finger in it and you’ve no more hands to stop the water, you deal with the emergency and the patient in front of you.

“There are patients who are on for surgery who, because more urgent cases keep bouncing in front of them, they just never get to the top of a waiting list because we have to deal with those we perceive are urgent.”

The consultant general surgeon said, increasingly, the only way for such patients to get the operation they need is if their condition deteriorates to the point that they become an emergency case. He continued:

“There is very good data that operating on most conditions as an emergency will have worse outcomes...than those that can be sorted out on a more scheduled and planned basis.

“So, there is no doubt that the urgent and routine waits where people are waiting horrendously long times — there will be patients in those groups who will be disadvantaged by the wait.

“Undoubtedly there are patients who are not referred red flag, who are sitting in routine and urgent waiting lists, whose symptoms are potentially due to an early cancer that will be disadvantaged.

“That is only part of the story, there are also patients who have time dependent benign disease that is also disadvantaging them by not being timely investigated or seen for the first consultation.”

He said this can severely impact on patients’ lives, including stopping them from working and socialising and forcing them to adhere to a strict diet or a reliance on painkillers.

He said the waits are impacting on A&ES as more patients are attending hospitals as emergency cases while they wait for an operation.