I welcome the Minister to the Chamber and I wish her well in her new role in the Department of Social and Family Affairs. She and I will have plenty of interaction with the decentralisation of departmental offices to Buncrana, as well as the social welfare consolidation office.
I wish to speak about the need for the Minister for Health and Children to outline the efforts being made to reduce waiting lists at Letterkenny General Hospital, and to ascertain whether the supports being given under the National Treatment Purchase Fund are equal to other parts of the country for those waiting over three months for operations. I am doing this in order to find out the impact of the NTPF and to ensure that people become more aware of it and choose it as an option. I recently received a letter from the Minister for Health and Children which indicated that around 130,000 people will have used the NTPF by the end of this year, and that 98% to 99% of them are very happy with their experience of it.
There are 2,900 people across the country waiting longer than 12 months for an operation, but half of them are centred in four hospitals, namely, Letterkenny, Sligo, Tallaght and Tullamore. For that reason I have been encouraging people to use the NTPF. I issued a press release telling people that it was as good an option as any other, and it meant that people could speedily get their operation carried out and have it paid for by the Government. I also asked the general manager of Letterkenny General Hospital about the waiting lists. Thankfully, he indicated that there has been a substantial drop in the number of people waiting for over one year in Letterkenny. There are currently 400 people waiting more than 12 months there. However, he also pointed out that a person must now be waiting 12 months to be referred from Letterkenny to the NTPF, which is very different from three months' waiting time for the rest of the country.
My good work in trying to persuade people to avail of the NTPF if there is a long waiting list for a particular operation seems to be undermined by all this. It is discriminatory if patients from other parts of the country are put on the NTPF waiting list after three months, while patients in Letterkenny are only put on it after 12 months. I also spoke to representatives from the NTPF, and they are anxious to get the 12 month list reduced. They want to ensure priority for those people who spend more time on the list. However, my concern is that somebody should not be penalised because of geography. If I have a serious health problem and I cannot wait 12 months to be put on the NTPF, I will be forced to consider the private option. That is not right.
This Government has put substantial resources into the NTPF, which has driven down waiting times and waiting lists. It has a very good satisfaction rating and 130,000 people will have used it by the end of this year. Are the supports being provided to the NTPF equal in Letterkenny to the rest of the country? No matter who is responsible for this, I am only interested in the welfare of the patients, who must come first. General practitioners, the representatives of the hospital and the NTPF should advocate the wonderful work that is being done and should encourage people to go to somebody other than the consultant to whom they have been referred. It is a very successful, well funded project, and we in Letterkenny should not be different to the rest of the country.
