Public hospitals' fears of losing patients and funding if they referred patients to the National Treatment Purchase Fund are completely groundless, according to NTPF chief executive Patrick O'Byrne.
He said yesterday that there were sufficient numbers of patients to avail of public hospital services as well as take up spare NTPF capacity.
"If you look at what's happening in the system at the moment, one of the problems we have is that people cannot get access to consultants, so there are more than enough patients out there to absorb all the facilities. So as far as we are concerned, that sort of fear is absolutely groundless," he said.
Mr O'Byrne said that when the NTPF was set up there had been "a certain amount of scare-mongering out there", but a lot of those fears had been overcome. Most doctors were now referring patients to the NTPF if they were waiting "any great length of time".
In most cases, patients were being referred to the NTPF if they were on a public waiting list for up to 12 months. However, there were still a number of hospitals where patients were spending more than 12 months on a waiting list before being referred.
In Dublin, St Vincent's University Hospital, Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown and the Eye and Ear Hospital were referring patients to the NTPF only after a 12-month waiting period, while in Cork the Mercy University Hospital was similarly only referring patients who had been on their waiting list for more than 12 months.
Mr O'Byrne said that some 27,000 patients had been treated under the NTPF since it was set up. From 2002 to February 2005, €63 million had been spent on buying surgical procedures in private hospitals for these 27,000 patients, and there were plans to spend a further €64 million this year, during which the NTPF hoped to provide treatment for 16,000 patients.
The average cost of the procedures which are purchased is €3,500. Most of the procedures are carried out in private hospitals in Ireland, although the NTPF also has contracts with hospitals in London and Manchester. It has used the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the US for child cardiac procedures.
Included in the specialities the NTPF has purchased are: cataract operations; prostate surgery; cystoscopy; ear, nose and throat procedures; hernia and gall-bladder operations; vascular and plastic surgery; gynaecology; and orthopaedic surgery, including hip and knee replacements.
Mr O'Byrne, who was speaking in Cork, said that the NTPF had been under-utilised there. Cork patients had accounted for only 8 per cent of NTPF procedures in spite of the city and county making up more than 11 per cent of the State's population.
From the time the NTPF was set up in 2002, some 2,275 patients from Cork University Hospital, the South Infirmary and the Mercy University Hospital had been treated under it. Some 135 of these patients had been sent to hospitals in the UK.
Mr O'Byrne said that the NTPF could treat up to 200 more patients from the Cork area each month, including up to 100 suffering from cataracts.