“My 13 year old daughter has been suffering from nose bleeds and dizziness. I received a letter from Tullamore hospital putting her on the waiting list to be seen in 4.7 years time. 249 weeks to be exact. She will be 18.”

43 comments

  1. Wow! How the fuck? In Texas if you are poor and sick you just die but 4.7 years is just as bad.

  2. It’s not funding, we’re one of the best-funded healthcare systems in the world, so what is it.

    Imagine being that mother, your child is sick and this is the response. It’s just a load of nonsense sending that letter out, clearly she can’t wait. All of us should be protesting the immediate firing of everyone that runs this criminally inept service, gut the health service, rehire and restructure, this isn’t good enough for a country in the EU.

  3. ACCOUNTABILITY! This is the only thing holding this country back. Politicians and civil servants are never held accountable for the terrible jobs they are doing.

  6. I had to get marks on back checked a few years ago. They put me on a waiting list for 18 months or said you could go private and be seen next week.

    Two tier health system.

  7. My child needs a procedure very very badly (not life threatening but serious pain issues and affects development). 4 year waiting list for public.
    Family on both sides got together to pay for private care. There was a 4 week wait for a consultation, where I was told the child would be treated in 4 to 6 weeks. Rang for an update as we’d not heard anything back from them and they said they call back in 6 more weeks with an update on operating date.
    What I don’t get is how the private consultant is also the public doctor and will be carrying out the operation in the public hospital

  9. Go to vueling.com, grab a flight to Paris ( returns around 80 euro ).

    Downoad an APP called Doctolib, select the specialist you want to see on the day you want to see them, filter by English speaking. Appointment will be around 30 to 40euro.

    By no means the best solution, but if you want head to Disneyland for the day also, a much better, cheaper all round experience

  10. The govt pay 4 to 5k per person for the HSE, and you get years of waiting times. If you then add just 1k on top of that for private insurance, you get weeks of waiting time. How can that 1k make such a difference, especially when a private company is also taking profit from that 1k. Seems to suggest a lot of thr 5k the govt put in is squandered badly.

  11. 837 unfilled consultant posts as of March 2022, hence waiting lists like this.

    A two tier pay system for new consultants means there’s very little incentive for them to work in the HSE when they can have better pay/quality of life in private practice or abroad.

  13. Really sorry to hear your kid will be an adult before a schedule appointment can be made. It’s a broken system.
    Our child was born extremely premature late last year, in neonatal with a host of issues for 4 months and got released with a referral for a hernia operation. We called the hospital and told it is a 3.5 year waiting to be seen. Private is 3 months. Fuck the HSE.

  18. My friend’s daughter had suspected sensory issues and was put on a 5 year waitlist to test it properly. (They went private and got it sorted in a few weeks). This child was 2 and the HSE wanted to wait until she was 7 to do the screening. With sensory issues early intervention is crucial.

    The HSE is a failure

  20. Do some procedures take longer to get than others?

    I was placed on a waiting list for an ultrasonic on my liver but I was told months which is a lot sooner than I’ve heard.

  21. The way our public health service is managed is a joke. Note I am not just saying HSE, as in my experience these issues affect all organisations that are part of the public health care system.

    Both my children have long term health issues, so they are always visiting doctors and out-patients departments. Here is a sampling of the issues we have had….

    One department in a CHI hospital has decided to opt-out of using the CHI centralised appointment booking system. My son had an appointment with that department and I called up the hospital to query something about it. The hospital appointments department was absolutely adamant he did not have an appointment, even to go as far as pulling his paper records to double check. Come the day of the appointment and I’m getting phone calls from the department asking where he is. I explained to them that I was told that there was no appointment, and they explained that they have a separate booking system and that this happens all the time. So they issued another appointment, and I was left scratching my head as to why such a stupid system exists. And yes, the hospital appointments department seems to be unaware that this particular department does this.

    My son had an appointment for some tests at Connolly hospital back in March. The appointment was on a Monday, but on the preceding Saturday he got covid. I called the hospital to cancel the appointment, but was told the appointments department was closed for the weekend and that I should send an email, which I did. Got an email back around midday on the Monday confirming receipt of my cancellation email. On Wednesday we got a letter from the hospital saying that because he failed to turn up for an appointment they were cancelling all future treatment for him and and our GP would have to re-refer him. Well it turns out that the system in this department wasl set up in such a way that if you miss an appointment you are automatically removed from the hospital as a patient. Because they opened the email after the appointment time they didn’t get a chance to prevent this happening. At first they were insistent that my GP restart the referral process, it was only after I started threatening going to the media that they relented and issued him a new appointment.

    My son needs to see a cardiac specialist as a precaution due to him taking some drugs that could cause heart problems. He is on the waiting list to see a specialist at Connolly. Every three months we get a letter that says we have to respond within a certain number of days or he’ll be taken off the list. I find it extremely disturbing that they would be willing to put a child at risk like that in order to get shorter waiting lists. Plus, what happens if the letter gets lost in the mail? He could be taken off the waiting list and we would know nothing about it.

    Just last week, a random prescription arrived in the post for my son. It was just a prescription with no covering letter or note, not even a hastily scribbled Post-It. I called the hospital to ask what was going on because we hadn’t seen a doctor recently. Turns out as a result of some blood tests he did four months ago they decided to prescribe him something. I said that I found it troubling that they would just send out a prescription with no explanation whatsoever. Their response was to say that that’s just what they do in situations like this. And one more weird thing about this, the prescription came in duplicate using carbon paper. A note at the bottom of the prescription said that we were to take the duplicate to our GP. I really wonder why the hospital can’t send it to our GP directly, that would seem the safe thing to do if you want to keep good quality records?

    All the above are management problems,. It is managers and administrators who come up with these weird convoluted appointment systems and ways of managing waiting lists. In the case of the prescription, the doctor fills it out with notes and it’s left up to an administrator to contact the parents and explain what’s going on on but they don’t. Can you imagine the efficiency savings there would be if there was a centralised appointment system run by the HSE that all hospitals had to use? All this sort of stuff would be easy to fix really easy, but it seems there is no appetite or desire to actually make these changes. Instead, patients are are are forced to put up with a weird convoluted system that doesn’t make any sense at all and and probably puts them at greater risk.

    I’ve always found the Frontline staff to be absolutely dead on and I can see their frustration with all this as well.

  22. I actually am currently struggling with the whole nose bleeds and dizziness craic. Nose bleeds are kinda sporadic but common enough to be out of place and the dizziness and blocked sinuses are a constant pain in the hole for me since November. Stuck doing the Leaving atm so can’t really be bothered hospital hopping.

  25. NOT TO be bad but maybe they are hoping people will just die before they have to be seen :/

  26. I remember seeing a letter in The Irish Times a few years ago from someone who drove up to Newry, walked into a hospital and was treated straightaway…

  27. And this is a problem with Irish healthcare.

    It doesn’t matter how good a specialist is, if you never see him / her in reasonable time.

  28. Their only solutions amount to awarding their friends with lucrative positions. Now there’s a top heavy unsustainable structure.

  30. Fast, cheap, quality. You can only ever have two. If it’s free and it works, it’s not going to fast. If it’s cheap and fast, you won’t have quality. If it’s quality and fast, it’s not going to be cheap.
    Shambles but that’s the world we live in

  32. I’m 17 months since referral waiting for a psychiatric assessment.

    I’m glad it’s ‘only’ OCD because god help me if it were something worse.

  35. Had heart surgery a few years ago. Saw cardiologist in 6 weeks. Tests a week later and was talking to the surgeon after another week. All public. First question surgeon asked me after telling me I needed surgery was if I had private cover. Had surgery 8 weeks later. His public secretary told me at my checkup that people were waiting years for public surgery. He did 4 days private and 1 public.

  36. Please look into the cross border healthcare directive and the treatment abroad scheme, which is available if the treatment is:.

    not available within the time normally necessary to get it in Ireland – this will take into account your current health and the likely course of your condition or disease.

    Or under the cross border directive:

    you may choose to access those services in another member state of the European Union (EU) or European Economic Area (EEA),

    There are rules and waiting times etc. But it’s an option if you’ve waited a long time.

    I’ve been through this and applied for the treatment abroad under EU law(they haven’t put this in place voluntarily and don’t want people to know about it). Funnily enough, after applying, got an appointment straight away here.

    They don’t want to pay for treatment abroad but if everyone did it, they’d soon sort the mess out. If they can find €30 billion to pay for the pandemic, they can find a few more billion to sort out the health of the nation.

    https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/eu_healthcare/cross_border_directive.html

  38. Was on the phone this week to the hospital in the north about several appointments. Here’s the wait times:
    Gastroenterology Urgent referral-referred 2016, 6 years untill appointment

    Neurology urgent- referred 2018- ten years untill appointment

    Ent red flag appointment- referred this year 3 years till appointment

    Yearly hearing aid review- 5 years till appointment.

    Untill these appointments, I am considered in perfect working health by the government too so no benefits etc. I’m likely going to die before finding out what’s wrong with me.

  39. We nearly lost our daughter because the first hospital that we dealt with issued her referral by post and the other hospital never received it.If I hadn’t kept ringing they would have forgotten about her and she would have died.When we finally received an appointment, they told us it would be a very simple procedure that would take less than an hour and she would be allowed home that afternoon.We realised after an hour and a half things weren’t good.It was 2 weeks before she could go home and she required round the clock care.That was over 3 years ago and she is getting there. What I learned from our healthcare system is, it’s broken. Tax payers money is being wasted & we have a system that needs to be demolished from the very top & it needs to be restructured so that the wasters can be removed & the ones who actually know what they are talking about can be listened to.

  41. Nosebleeds in children are really low priority. They are almost invariably venous bleeds that the child will grow out of. Topical Naseptin cream is just as effective as cautery.

    The waiting list is excessive but this is a low risk low priority complaint.

  42. Makes Sláintecare seem like a far off pipe dream.

    Sure they should call it Sláncare as we’ve already said goodbye to decent healthcare.

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