Fears thousands of patients will deteriorate as waiting lists climb to record high
THE number of public patients waiting to see a specialist has reached another record high of 612,083 amid growing alarm about the dangers of deteriorating health and delayed diagnosis.
The alarming outpatient figures for September show clinic backlogs are now running out of control.
There was a slight drop in people waiting for surgery but it is still worryingly high – down from 34,674 to 34,605.
There was also just a small dent in the queue for a gastronintestinal scope, falling from 77,620 to 75,902.
As admissions of patients with Covid-19 grow, the pressure on beds and intensive care will mean more waiting list patients will be put on hold again.
It comes in advance of today’s annual conference of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association where its president Professor Alan Irvine will denounce the waiting queues as “reckless”.
He is set to tell Health Minister Stephen Donnelly the August waiting list total – of patients in some form of hospital delay – was 840,000 people waiting for care.
“Right now, 500 consultant posts remain vacant. That’s unsustainable. Yet as the unenviable choices mount up, Government continues to evade the choices which would avoid much of the pain,” he will say.
He will tell the minister “the solution is not just beds. It’s transparency about beds. That people are dubious about promised bed numbers reflects the fact that the system has singularly failed to demonstrate that it can deliver and deploy additional beds.”
It is recognised that “delivering bed capacity can be complex. But it has been done already, in the form of modular beds in South Tipperary,
University Hospital Limerick and in response to the pandemic, step-down solutions like Dublin’s Citywest Hotel.
“Not ideal, but all examples of capacity at speed, at how solutions can be delivered.”
Meanwhile, today is the European Day for Organ Donation and Transplantation.
The HSE said that demand for organ transplantation is increasing all over the world, but there are not enough organs available to meet the need. This shortage is the limiting factor in treating many patients with chronic organ failure and has led to high numbers of patients on waiting lists.
Last year, more than 150,000 patients were registered on organ waiting lists in Europe. In Ireland 274 organ transplants were carried out. At the National Renal Transplant Service at Beaumont Hospital, 153 kidney transplants were performed, 25 from living donors.
Another 66 liver transplants happened at St Vincent’s Hospital, and 38 lung transplants and 15 heart transplants took place in the Mater Hospital.