ALMOST 18,000 hospital operations were cancelled last year – an increase of 10 per cent on 2008, according to newly-released figures.Fine Gael Health Spokesman Dr James Reilly, who obtained the data from the Health Service Executive on foot of a parliamentary question, said that over 50,000 operations in hospitals had been cancelled since 2007.
Dr Reilly said that cancelling operations had become a policy for managing “gridlock” in hospitals.
It was not good enough to say these operations were only postponed and re-scheduled for a later date, he added. Behind each case was a patient who had sometimes travelled long distances and prepared for a procedure only to see it cancelled.
He said he had recently come across a case where a man had travelled to Dublin for an operation, had fasted for 24 hours and was in a robe ready to be taken to theatre when he was told that a more urgent case had come in and his procedure was being cancelled.
“Cancelled operations have a real impact on patients – postponing important procedures, prolonging pain and delaying investigations which may lead to early detection of serious illnesses. It is not unheard of for patients whose procedures have been postponed to end up in AE.”
Dr Reilly said that at 17,761, the number of operations cancelled in 2009 represented a 10 per cent increase on 2008. He said that a similar increase had been seen between 2007 and 2008.
“This shows that cancelling operations has become engrained as a policy for managing hospital gridlock brought about by overcrowded AE departments, a lack of acute beds for admission and the delayed discharge of patients in acute beds who need to move to more appropriate care but have no place to go.
“HSE figures show that 14,903 operations were cancelled in 2007, 16,177 in 2008 and 17,761 in 2009. This means the number of cancelled operations in those three years is close to a scandalous 50,000. By now it will have exceeded that figure.”
In a statement yesterday the HSE said the figures for cancellations given to Fine Gael related to both day and in-patient procedures.
It said that the cancellations and postponements recorded last year accounted for 1.4 per cent of its total elective activity “in a system that is required to flexibly respond to a mixture of both planned and emergency activity”.
The HSE said that this compared to 2007 figures, where cancellations represented 1.2 per cent of overall activity.
“Cancellations can be made by the hospital or by the patient, and when the former is the case, is usually the result of unavoidable circumstances like level of emergency admissions and activity, infection control and general availability of beds or staff for the duration of the admission or procedure.
“Any postponement of a planned procedure is of course a very regrettable inconvenience for the patient, but when they are required, the HSE and all its hospitals do all they can to minimise the impact on our patients. It is important to bear in mind that these procedures are, in the great majority of cases, immediately rescheduled for the next possible date for both patient and hospital,” the HSE stated.
The HSE said that in 2009, its 50 public acute hospitals provided 1,262,000 elective procedures, both day and in-patient, to patients.
“We provided in-patient treatment to 593,359 people, and we provided 669,955 day case treatments. As our level of activity has grown each year since 2005, it is to be expected that the level of cancellations would increase in parallel.”
