550 children awaiting treatment at tullamore hospital

Laois/Offaly TD Barry Cowen has described figures revealing over 550 children are awaiting treatment at Tullamore Hospital as extremely worrying.

Deputy Cowen has said he is extremely concerned by new figures outlining the number of children waiting for treatment at the Midland Regional Hospital, Tullamore.

Figures released to Deputy Cowen show over 550 children are waiting for scheduled treatment. Over 300 of these are waiting longer than the target of 20 weeks.

In a statement this evening(Tuesday), the HSE said: “All In Patient waiting lists are under constant scrutiny. Scheduling of patients is on a clinical priority basis whereby urgent patients are prioritised and routine patients are scheduled chronologically according to available capacity.”

According to Deputy Cowen, “figures released to me by the Minister for Health show that a total of 305 children are waiting for in-patient treatment and 246 patients are waiting for daycase procedures at the Midland Regional Hospital Tullamore, over 550 in total.”  

He noted “the latest available paediatric waiting list figures also show 183 children waiting for in-patient treatment have been waiting longer than the 20 week target and, of these, 21 have been waiting more than a year. Of those awaiting daycase treatment, 124 have been waiting longer than 20 weeks and of these, 13 have been waiting more than 12 months.”

Deputy Cowen said “these figures are extremely worrying and a shocking indictment of the Government’s health agenda over the last four years. The Government has fundamentally failed to bring about the necessary reforms and put in place adequate resources to ensure children in need of serious medical treatment or operations can be treated in a timely manner.”

“The Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has assured me that targeting ‘long waiters’ for treatment is a key priority for him in the department and says “rigorous waiting list management is critical to success”.  Unfortunately what we have seen from Minister Varadkar to date is a lot of comment and analysis of the problems facing the health service and a complete denial of the fact that it’s the Government’s decisions over the last four years that have helped create a lot of the problems patients are facing,” stated Deputy Cowen.