Nearly 70,000 appointments have been cancelled at the region’s main hospital in the last 18 months.
The number of in person appointments at University Hospital Limerick also fell by a third in 2020, largely as a result of COVID-19 restrictions.
The Emergency Unit in Dooradoyle has been advising the public to seek alternative medical care if their case is non-urgent in recent weeks, after a spike in presentations to the facility.
Aontu member Sarah Beasley, whose party uncovered the figures, believes in spite of the investment undertaken in the health service since the onset of the pandemic, more funding may now be needed.
UL Hospitals Group Response
No-one would deny that cancellations of hospital appointments have a detrimental impact on patients. These are decisions that no hospital management wishes to make. However, these decisions should not be viewed in isolation but in the context of how, since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the delivery of healthcare and all public services in this country. Neither should there be any underestimation of the impact on our services of the cyberattack on national HSE IT systems in May 2021. In common with the pandemic, the response to the impact of the cyberattack on public hospitals across the country, arose from the need to ensure the most time-critical and urgent care was prioritised and provided during the subsequent period of IT restoration.
It should be noted that throughout the pandemic, UL Hospitals Group has followed, and continues to follow, national guidance in relation to the cancellation of scheduled activity and to the gradual, slow and steady re-emergence of services following each wave of COVID-19.
Locally as well as nationally, the learnings from the COVID-19 experience and the cyberattack are being incorporated into our models of care and operating environment on an on-going basis.
At all times in the past 16 months, hospital management has remained focused on our inpatient and outpatient waiting lists. Executive Oversight Meetings are held every week in order to review our waiting lists, and we have actively devised and implemented means of minimising the inconvenience that wait times cause for patients and their loved ones.
Over the past six months, UL Hospitals Group has secured the appointment of 9 new consultant posts in the areas of Anaesthesiology, Radiology, Neonatology, Medicine, Histopathology and Oncology. The Group has also been approved for the appointment of a further 36 new Consultant posts by the HSE to support our new developments on site. We are currently progressing with these through the regulatory framework process with the Consultants Application Advisory Committee (CAAC), and we anticipate that many of these posts will be advertised for filling in the coming months.
Under the Private Hospital Safety Net Service Agreement, UL Hospitals Group has undertaken a thorough review of urgent surgical and medical waiting lists, and referred 2,359 procedures to a number of private hospitals. It is anticipated that this activity will continue under the national agreement, which has a term of 12 months.
UL Hospitals Group is also discussing several initiatives with the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), and wherever possible, virtual clinics are being used across our services, as a means of identifying patients who can be progressed whether for diagnostic imaging, minor procedures, or full episodes of care.
Enhanced access to scheduled care has been highlighted by the Department of Health as a priority for inclusion in the HSE’s 2021 Service Plan, and the need to address access and waiting list challenges is a key strategic priority in the HSE’s corporate plan for the next three years. It is a key priority also of Sláintecare. In this, the HSE has established a Scheduled Care Transformation Programme to ensure a sustained, system-wide transformation process that tackles the challenge of scheduled care waiting times, improves access to scheduled care services, and ensures the safe delivery of care in the context of the on-going pandemic.
