The HSE has confirmed that over 700,000 planned procedures for patients were cancelled since 2023 to the middle of this year.<\/p>\n
It said that the term cancellation does not mean that the appointment did not go ahead.<\/p>\n
The HSE said appointments and procedures are often rescheduled within a short period of the original appointment.<\/p>\n
The HSE said that between January and June this year, 148,179 planned appointments were cancelled.<\/p>\n
Figures show that in recent years, the number of cancelled patient operations has been rising.<\/p>\n
For the first three quarters of this year, over 220,000 operations were cancelled, according to the figures published by the Irish Medical Times newspaper for its Patient Solutions conference today.<\/p>\n
That compared with 286,545 cancellations last year; 267,426 in 2023 and 194,000 in 2022.<\/p>\n
This would bring the total to almost one million cancellations in almost four years.<\/p>\n
Stephen McMahon, Irish Patients Association, described the numbers as shocking.<\/p>\n
He added that patients can be taken off the public lists without their knowledge.<\/p>\n
Mr McMahon said there are a whole load of processes to validate the waiting lists in the system.<\/p>\n
He said the danger is that if the system deletes people from the waiting list, without their consent and knowledge, this is a violation of their patients’ rights.<\/p>\n
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association said that relying on the cancellation of scheduled care to manage daily pressures is not sustainable.<\/p>\n
It added that the cancellations are now a persistent issue and have a serious knock-on effect and point to an extreme lack of capacity in the system.<\/p>\n
Each year, HSE hospitals manage over four million planned inpatient and day case procedures.<\/p>\n
At the Patient Solutions conference in Dublin, the head of the Department of Health was asked about cancelled procedures.<\/p>\n
Robert Watt, Secretary General at the Department of Health, said it depends on what happens when a procedure is deferred, and how quickly the appointment will be rescheduled.<\/p>\n
It could be two weeks later, he added.<\/p>\n
Mr Watt said that the key issue is for patients to access care as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
He said that for the first nine months of this year, the service has delivered 5.8 million episodes of care, compared to 4.8 million five years ago.<\/p>\n
He told the meeting that the number of day cases is up 13-14% and inpatient cases up 8-9% in activity, so the service is delivering more procedures.<\/p>\n
Health officials say that there are many reasons for planned operations being cancelled.<\/p>\n
These include a lack of bed capacity, a large number of emergency presentations, staff shortages and also patients not being well enough, or available for the procedure.<\/p>\n
Sinn F\u00e9in’s spokesperson on health, David Cullinane, said that the cancellation of nearly one million hospital appointments in less than four years since January 2022 was a “mark of shame” and showed that government failure is causing chaos in the health service.<\/p>\n
He added that managers and doctors are left with little choice but to cancel appointments, when they are faced with overcrowding, understaffing and a lack of protected capacity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The HSE has confirmed that over 700,000 planned procedures for patients were cancelled since 2023 to the middle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-124709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}