Pumping cash in to reduce waiting lists for hospitals ‘will not work’
‘A waiting target of months is shocking’
THROWING money at hospital waiting lists won’t cut waiting times, according to a leading health economist.
Using money to solve the crisis ‘is the least efficient problem-solving technique on earth’, said Professor Arne Björnberg, who attended the Future Health Summit in Dublin this week.
He also criticised the HSE’s national target times: ‘No other country has a waiting time in months. As a target, this is shocking,’ he said.
The HSE’s current target is to have no patients waiting longer than 15 months by October this year.
Prof. Björnberg heads the Euro Health Consumer Index, which measures performance across 35 healthcare systems.
He said the four worst countries for patients waiting on treatment were Ireland, the UK, Sweden and Poland.
Prof. Björnberg told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘It’s typical for public healthcare anywhere that the prime problem-solving technique is throwing money at the problem. That is the least efficient problem-solving technique on earth.’
He added that, in Ireland, the issue was not quality of treatment but access to it.
‘Ireland’s treatment results are pretty good – better than the UK, in fact.
‘But a memo put out by your health authorities in 2015 said they have a project to reduce waiting times, and one of the targets at that time was the time should not exceed 18 months.’
Prof. Björnberg said using a target of months rather than weeks or days was ‘shocking’. He added that Irish patients were being let down by management strategies, not lack of money, and that accessibility had nothing to do with resources.
‘The four most accessible systems in Europe are Switzerland and Belgium, certainly wealthy countries, but also the Czech Republic and Macedonia,’ he said.
He showed the MoS a graph representing the health system in Macedonia, saying: ‘This is a country that abolished waiting lists in less than a year. Booking a specialist in Macedonia today is like booking a hairdresser – the waiting time is days, not months. They are a poor country. The quality of the treatment is not always high but it is accessible. Ireland could do exactly the same. It’s not enough to just look at it – you have to implement it.’
April figures for Ireland show 558,815 people waiting for inpatient or out-patient hospital appointments. The health index uses data from patient groups and governments but, since 2015, relies on patient data alone for Ireland because of the discrepancy between official statistics and patients’ own experiences of waiting times.
State figures were further undermined by the discovery of ‘hidden’ waiting lists earlier this year. A HSE spokeswoman did not respond to requests for a comment this week.