Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly has today (07 March 2023) published the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan. The 2023 Waiting List Action Plan sets out the ongoing priorities to continue to address waiting lists this year. The 30 actions in the Plan focus on delivering capacity, reforming scheduled care, and enabling scheduled care reform.
A new multi-annual approach to sustainably reduce and reform hospital waiting lists and waiting times was adopted in September 2021. The Department of Health working closely with the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), developed the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan as the next stage of this approach. The Action Plan is ambitious, targeting significant in-year additional activity to reduce waiting lists and move us closer to achieving the Sláintecare maximum wait times.
Minister Donnelly said:
“While the Government recognises that acute hospital scheduled care waiting lists are far too long, and that many patients are waiting an unacceptably long time for care, we are beginning to see progress. Last year saw an 11% fall in number waiting over Sláintecare targets (56,000 adults and children). This represents a fall from the Covid peak of 24%.
Countries across the world are also reporting increased pressure on their healthcare services and associated waiting lists largely due to the unprecedented impact of the pandemic. While these waiting lists have been a challenge for the Irish healthcare system for decades, they worsened considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic, and health services are now dealing with significant pent-up demand.
Minister Donnelly added:
“Activity funded under the 2023 Plan, that commenced in January, continues the work initiated in the 2021 and 2022 Action Plans. In 2023, €443 million has been allocated in the Budget to continue this work. As we emerge from the pandemic and winter surges in COVID-19, ‘flu and RSV that greatly affected the capacity in our hospitals, there remain significant risks, assumptions and dependencies that will require effective mitigation to successfully deliver the 2023 plan. Without the intervention of the 2022 Plan, it is estimated that waiting lists would have increased by 42% to over 1 million people. Last year’s Action Plan was an important step towards enacting longer-term reforms and meaningful changes. While positive progress was made, there is much more work to be done.”
- Key Highlights from the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan include:
- €443 million was allocated in Budget 2023 to address waiting lists.
- The 2023 Plan allocates €363 million of this funding as the next stage of the multi-annual approach to sustainably reduce and reform hospital waiting lists and waiting times.
- €80 million was allocated to various primary/community care related initiatives.
- The 2023 Plan is funding the HSE and the NTPF to reduce hospital waiting lists by 10% in 2023.
- This is building on the reductions in the waiting lists achieved in Q4 2021 and again in 2022.
- The agreed cross-party objective is to have nobody waiting longer than the Sláintecare targets (10 weeks Out Patient Department, 12 weeks Inpatient/Day Case/gastrointestinal endoscopy).
- o In 2022 the numbers waiting over the Sláintecare targets fell by 11%, or 56,000 people.
- o Since the pandemic peak there has been a 24% reduction in the number of people waiting longer than the Sláintecare targets.
- c.1.56 million patients were removed and c.1.53 million patients added to active hospital waiting lists during 2022 – a net reduction of c.30,000 people (4.1%) to c.690,000.
- The €363 million in the 2023 Plan includes recurrent funding of €123 million for the HSE to implement longer-term reforms such as modernised care pathways and closing capacity gaps.
- Non-recurrent funding of €240 million is also allocated to NTPF and HSE to provide additional public and private activity to clear the backlogs exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The NTPF continues to prove effective in securing care for patients. In 2022 one of its initiatives relates to patients waiting more than six months for 15 high volume procedures. This year the NTPF is reducing the time to three months and expanding to 20 high volume procedures.
- The 2023 Plan focuses on 30 actions across 3 areas (Delivering Capacity; Reforming Scheduled Care; Enabling Scheduled Care Reform) and will be governed by the Waiting List Task Force.
Minister Donnelly concluded:
“With the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan, my Department, the HSE and the NTPF are taking the next steps in the multi-annual approach towards achieving our vision of a world-class public healthcare system in which everyone has timely and transparent access to high-quality scheduled care, where and when they need it, in line with Sláintecare reforms”.
ENDS
Notes to editor:
The 2023 Waiting List Action Plan is the next stage of this multi-annual approach and is the product of extensive consultation between the Department of Health, the HSE and the NTPF.
The 2023 Waiting List Action Plan allocates €363 million, as the next stage of the multi-annual approach to sustainably reduce and reform hospital waiting lists and waiting times, comprising:
- €123 million in funding to be made available to the HSE on a recurring basis to implement modernised care pathways and to sustainably close capacity gaps in the system.
- €240 million in non-recurrent funding to the NTPF and HSE to continue providing additional public and private activity to maintain the momentum of further reducing waiting volumes and times.
€80 million was allocated to various primary/community care related initiatives, including expanding the successful GP Access to Diagnostics programme, as part of the total of €443 million allocated in Budget 2023 to address waiting lists.
To continue progressing the implementation of long-term reforms in tandem with continuing to address waiting list backlogs, the 2023 Plan focuses on three key areas, under which 30 short, medium, and long-term actions will be delivered this year to achieve the target reductions in waiting lists and waiting times:
- Delivering Capacity in 2023: 11 actions for the immediate delivery of additional activity within the private and public system to reduce waiting volumes and times. Actions will deliver additional OPD appointments, IPDC procedures and GI Scopes in 2023, resulting in a waiting list reduction of just over 10% by year-end. Other actions relating to the delivery of capacity include progressing the development of five surgical hubs nationally to increase dedicated capacity for elective activity in our hospitals and an action to deliver additional community activity to reduce waiting lists for high priority services, mainly for children.
- Reforming Scheduled Care: Eight actions to progress medium-to-longer term reforms to fundamentally resolve underlying barriers to the timely delivery of acute scheduled care. This includes further work on modernising patient care pathways, with the full implementation of seven priority pathways and commencing implementation of a further 29. Other reform actions to be progressed in 2023 include implementation of patient-initiated reviews in 22 hospitals as part of a strategy to reduce the number of review appointments scheduled across the system; and establishment of patient-centred booking arrangements through a central referrals office, to improve patient experience, ensure patients are seen as quickly as possible and reform scheduling practices in acute hospitals.
- Enabling Scheduled Care Reform: 11 actions to progress key policy, process and technology enablers that are critical to supporting the whole of system reform required to improve access to scheduled care and achieve the Sláintecare maximum wait time targets. Actions under this heading include the development and delivery of waiting list management protocols, training and development programmes and the development of ICT infrastructure to enable the collection of data for radiology waiting lists and to support increased virtual patient engagements.