Cork hospital wait list removals could include those in need, says TD

A Cork Sinn Féin TD has raised the issue of 13,000 people being removed from hospital waiting lists in Cork last year in the Dáil.

Figures revealed to The Echo, under the Freedom of Information Act, show that almost 80,000 people on waiting lists for outpatient and inpatient appointments in Cork were sent letters asking if they still needed treatment in 2023 as part of a National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) validation scheme.

This involves hospital administration contacting patients on waiting lists to ensure that they are still available to attend appointments or require their procedure.

Of 79,779 people who were sent letters from six Cork hospitals asking if they wanted to remain on the waiting list, 12,269 people did not respond, and 13,346 were taken off the lists.

Cork South-Central TD, Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said: “GPs in Cork have raised a concern over the removal of some 13,000 people from the waiting list on foot of an NTPF validation exercise. While I appreciate that checks of the waiting list have to be made and we all want to see the waiting list come down, we want to see it come down on the basis of people not needing treatment. It is our experience and the experience of GPs that many of these people still require treatment.

“Many of them might have moved address, in particular younger people, and others might have literacy issues,” he said, asking the Minister of State to raise with the Minister for Health. “The need to ensure that any validation exercises are robust and fair — phone calls could be a part of that.”

He added that people have come to his constituency offices to explain that they have been removed from the list, saying “it is not dissimilar to the situation with housing. This can be very challenging for people who have been waiting a long time for treatment.”

Minister of State, Mary Butler said, “For somebody who is on a long-term waiting list, waiting list validation is very important. We have situations where people are on three or four waiting lists and they may already have received the treatment. It is very important that the waiting lists are accurate.”

Dr Greg Fulton, a member of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association executive, and a consultant vascular surgeon in Cork, told The Echo, “when people get removed from a waiting list, there can be several reasons for that.

“They may have been treated, they may decline treatment, or they may be taken off due to some form of communications misunderstanding, so you have to eliminate or at least make that third group as small as possible.”

He identified the difficulty around deciding what length the hospital should go to in order to contact people, but said: “Email addresses and telephones follow people around, but postal addresses don’t. The aspiration was to have a certain percentage of the list cut down. If part of the percentage was made up of people that were taken off the list, then that number is even smaller.”