‘Patients deserve to know the death toll from waiting lists’
Health chiefs say there are no stats as reform urged
HEALTH campaigners have called on the HSE and the Department of Health to find out how many people die while waiting for treatment.
This comes as both the agency and the Department have admitted to the Irish Daily Mail they don’t know how many people die while waiting for surgical procedures, appointments or even diagnostic care.
They also don’t know how many people, for example, go blind while waiting for cataract or other sightsaving treatments.
Cancer victim Susie Long’s husband Conor Mac Liam, who raised the importance of such statistics when his wife died ten years ago, said: ‘At the time, I put that question out there: why don’t we know how many people are dying because of late diagnosis? It is as utterly shocking to me now as it was at the time that this is not being done.’
The Irish Patients’ Association’s Stephen McMahon said: ‘If you don’t count the extent of a problem, you’re not able to manage the problem.’
Last night, the HSE told the Mail: ‘We have no way of determining this information.’ It also said: ‘Information like that is not available.’
The Department of Health also admitted to the Mail that it also does not have such critical statistics about the health service, where up to 3,400 surgical operations are cancelled each month.
Confirmation by them comes after an EU report last week stated that 3,800 people die in Ireland each year because they don’t get treated in time. A percentage of these figures will have nothing to do with waiting lists, but the figure is still alarming.
Despite not having the data, the technology they could use to easily get it has been around for more than ten years. And the Government has started funding it. iMeddoc – which Enterprise Ireland provided funding for earlier this year – is an app which makes healthcare audits much easier than it is at present.
Medical professionals have repeatedly warned of the dangers of delays, even in A&Es. In October 2016, for example, emergency department consultant Dr Fergal Hickey stated: ‘The evidence is with that, with ED crowding, somewhere between 100 and 350 patients per year die who wouldn’t otherwise die.’
A pinned tweet on the Twitter account for A&E consultant and health campaigner Dr Jim Gray reads: ‘Public patients who die on waiting lists and trolleys don’t matter to this gov. Voters need to remember this next time round.’
Last night, the IPA called for the Government to fund research that would estimate the death toll from waiting lists. Mr McMahon said: ‘If you don’t count the extent of a problem, you’re not able to manage the problem.’
Mr Mac Liam, whose late wife Susie’s cancer spread while she waited seven months for a colonoscopy, added: ‘After Susie died, I was saying surely there must have been other people who died but there is no record of their deaths, no record of why they died.’