Written answers

Tuesday, 9 October 2018

Department of Health

Hospital Waiting Lists

Photo of Stephen DonnellyStephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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279. To ask the Minister for Health if the Children's Hospital Group, CHG, is actively following national protocols as per the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF; and the person or body that oversees the wait lists in the CHG and ensures compliance to national NTPF protocols in regard to the national wait lists for scoliosis. [40851/18]

Photo of Simon HarrisSimon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) is responsible for collecting and validating all waiting lists for public hospitals.

As part of its statutory responsibilities the NTPF has also developed the National Waiting List Management Protocol, a standardised approach to managing scheduled care treatment for in-patient, day case and planned procedures to ensure that all administrative, managerial and clinical staff follow an agreed national minimum standard for the management and administration of waiting lists for scheduled care.

This Protocol, which has been adopted by the HSE, sets out the processes that hospitals are to implement to manage waiting lists. Furthermore, the NTPF also undertakes an annual audit programme of public hospitals to ensure compliance with the waiting list protocol.

The Children's Hospital Group (CHG) advise that all suspensions are managed in line with NTPF guidelines. Scoliosis patients in the suspended category are those that are not clinically ready for surgery. There is a plan in Our Lady's Children's Hospital Crumlin to progress a clinical case management system to categorise and manage those patients who do not need to be on a waiting list.

The CHG advise that at the end of September there were 24 patients on the suspended list at Our Lady's Children's Hospital Crumlin and in reviewing these patients there appears to be a number of patients who will be clinically deemed as not requiring surgery in 2018. These patients will be managed via the clinical case management system in the coming weeks in order to ensure that a safe, quality system is in place to support clinical decisions and case management.

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