As the Deputy will be aware, there are two streams to hospital activity, emergency and elective activity. Pressures on the hospital system due to identified capacity constraints hinder its ability to provide elective activity in a planned way because of the urgent and unpredictable needs of emergency patients. Patients who require elective treatment may have to wait because beds, staff and operating theatres are being used to treat emergency cases. The balance to be achieved is to ensure that the available resources are used efficiently and that treatment can be delivered to patients in a reasonable time.
Due to the nature of any health care system not all treatments can be made available to patients immediately. Hospital facilities must be used to best effect and it is sometimes necessary to place patients for non-urgent treatments on a waiting list. Therefore, the significant issue from the patients perspective is the length of time spent waiting for treatment and as such my Department's objective is to reduce waiting times significantly in the short term with particular focus on those waiting longest for treatment.
This Government has maintained a particular focus on those waiting longest for hospital treatment. The establishment of the national treatment purchase fund has resulted in more active management of long waiting lists at a local level. To date, the fund has arranged treatment for approximately 12,000 patients and has sourced further capacity for procedures in orthopaedics, ophthalmology, ENT, gynaecology, plastic surgery and urology. It is now the case that, in most instances, adults waiting more than six months for an operation and children waiting more than three months will be facilitated by the fund. If patients are prepared to exercise choice by travelling to where there is capacity, they can be treated a lot quicker in many instances. As the NTPF has the available capacity, and the fact that patients or their GPs can contact the NTPF directly to arrange treatment, the majority of patients do not need to wait more than six months for treatment.
While the rate of progress in achieving the targets set out in the health strategy has been slower than anticipated, significant progress has been achieved to date. The overall target of no patient waiting more than three months for treatment still remains a goal to be achieved.