More than 42,000 children have been waiting more than a year for vital healthcare in the community, according to new official figures that have prompted concerns that children are being “left behind by the State”.
An analysis of Health Service Executive waiting list figures across eight community healthcare disciplines found that at the end of June 287,787 people were waiting for these services, which are designed to drive care away from the acute hospital system.
This represents an increase of some 10 per cent on the total at the end of last year, when about 260,000 people were waiting.
The eight disciplines are audiology, dietetics, occupational therapy, ophthalmology, physiotherapy, podiatry, psychotherapy, and speech and language therapy.
RM Block
Of those waiting, 75,234 have been waiting for more than a year, with children accounting for the majority (42,376) of the total.
Across all age groups, physiotherapy had the largest number of people on a waiting list (87,901), followed by occupational therapy (47,850).
The figures, released to Social Democrats’ health spokesman Pádraig Rice TD in response to a series of parliamentary questions, highlight a particular difficulty in the area of child psychology, with more than 14,000 children waiting more than a year for this service.
The figures are in addition to the 4,424 children waiting to access Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, the 16,593 children waiting on an assessment of need, the 10,961 children on a waiting list for a child disability network team and the 4,945 adults on a homecare waiting list.
Mr Rice said the numbers reveal the “scale of the crisis in primary and community care” and that children in particular were being “left behind by the State”.
“This cannot be overlooked by Government any longer,” he said. “These are utterly unacceptable figures and yet, somehow, they have become the norm. This cannot be tolerated any longer.”
He said Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill “needs to get serious about building capacity in primary and community care”.
Moving care into the community and out of the hospital system is one of the key pillars of the Sláintecare health service reform plan.
Stephen McMahon, co-founder of the Irish Patients Association, said the long waiting list figures for children were “shocking and unacceptable”. He described it as an indication of something being “fundamentally wrong” with the system.
“There are serious implications to delayed care. Delayed access causes problems. Kids benefit greatly from timely healthcare, and if it is delayed this will impact their development,” Mr McMahon said.
“The whole thrust of community healthcare is to keep people out of the high cost of acute care. There are consequences to this and it is costing the system a lot more.”
A spokesman for the HSE said its primary care services provide for more than 3.2 million attendances each year across a range of therapy, diagnostic, general practice and home care settings. Almost 1.4 million therapy service users were seen last year, he said.
“We recognise the need to address waiting lists, and this is reflected in our commitment to developing the provision of community services through the newly established HSE health regions, in line with Sláintecare.”
The spokesman said there was a 7 per cent increase in referrals for therapy services in 2023 and a 1 per cent increase last year. However, he said the trend had “begun to stabilise” this year.
“In relation to children’s services, they are, by their nature, more complex in presentation and require more attendance compared to services for adults. It should be noted that when children transfer from specialist disability services to primary care, waiting time is calculated from the date of the original referral.”
