Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Lahart for raising this important issue today and for giving me the opportunity to update the House on it. Tallaght hospital provides a full range of ear, nose and throat, ENT, services, including tonsillectomy services, for both adults and paediatrics, with the exception of paediatric ENT airway management. Within the ENT services, tonsillectomy waiting times are not separately identified but are reported on as part of the ENT service overall. As published by the NTPF, the most recent waiting times for ENT services at Tallaght show 278 children and 321 adults awaiting inpatient or day case treatments. Of those, 87 adults and 64 children have been waiting longer than a year.

It is clear that the services are experiencing capacity challenges, which is of great concern to us all. In order to address the challenges, I am advised that the hospital has been working with the HSE in relation to the recruitment of ENT consultants. I am pleased to say that two consultant posts are currently in recruitment to fill vacant posts. One of those is a replacement post, providing both adult and paediatric services, while the second is a new post to provide adult ENT services. A further new paediatric consultant post has been re-advertised following a previously unsuccessful recruitment campaign. The posts, when in place, will improve access to ENT services at Tallaght. The hospital is also implementing other initiatives to optimise the capacity of the existing services, including nurse tonsillectomy triage and nurse-led grommets review clinics in paediatrics.

In the health system as a whole there has been a considerable and increasing demand for care. We are now seeing in a year approximately 3.2 million outpatient attendances at hospitals, while 100,000 patients have an elective inpatient procedure and more than 800,000 have a planned day case procedure. Clearly, that has increased pressure on waiting times, as the Deputy will be aware, which means that a sustained commitment to improving waiting times for patients across the health service is urgently needed. That is why the programme for a partnership Government commits to continued investment of €50 million per year specifically for the purpose.

A scheduled care governance group has been established in the HSE to co-ordinate key initiatives to reduce waiting times and the number of patients awaiting treatment. Actions overseen by the group include driving greater adherence to chronological scheduling, relocation of low-complexity surgical procedures to smaller hospitals and administrative and clinical validation procedures to ensure that patients are available for treatment. In addition, each hospital group has been mandated to designate a key person to lead and support waiting list management improvements in order to advance towards compliance with maximum waiting times.

I wish to reassure the House that officials in the Department of Health are working with the NTPF and the HSE to urgently address waiting lists across the health service for those waiting longest. The initiatives will be funded by the annual commitment of €50 million, to which I have already referred. The amount includes ring-fenced funding of €15 million in 2017 for the National Treatment Purchase Fund. That will allow us to balance demand and capacity in acute hospital services, including Tallaght hospital, and utilise primary, social and community care services to support the health of citizens.

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