Some patients with diabetes are still having to wait for more than a year to see a specialist once they are diagnosed by their family doctor. The waiting time at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital to see a specialist, for example, can be up to 14 months.
Dr Chris Thompson, a consultant endocrinologist at the hospital, said while this was an improvement on the situation a year ago, the delays were still unacceptable. "It was up to 24 months at one stage and now it's down to about 14 months. That is still too high," he said.
"We still can't see patients frequently enough. We would love to see a situation where GPs were funded to operate diabetes shared care schemes with their local hospital," he added.
Patients need to be seen by a consultant so they can be screened for eye and kidney diseases as well as foot problems, he said, adding that the long waiting times have meant there have been delays in diagnosing some of these problems.
But Dr Thompson said waiting times were falling and would fall further, thanks to the appointment in the past year of a further consultant and the opening of a new diabetes centre.
A third consultant endocrinologist is also due to start working at the hospital next month. But he pointed out there were still "vast swathes" of the country like the midlands which still had no diabetes specialist.
Meanwhile, south Dublin GP Dr Brian Meade said patients in his area, which is close to St Vincent's Hospital, can wait up to seven months to see a diabetes specialist in outpatients.
"There are long delays all over the country for diabetes patients to access care. Most of the clinics around the country it seems to me are overwhelmed by the number of diabetes patients that they have. There is an increasing number of patients with type 2 diabetes and there is concern among GPs that patients with diabetes are not getting seen quickly enough at hospital level," he said.
"What I was hoping would happen would be that a programme like Heartwatch, which currently deals with patients with heart disease, could be extended to include diabetes patients.
"It would . . . cost relatively little because the infrastructure is there already and the management of a Heartwatch patient and the management of a diabetes patient are very, very similar," he added.
Dr Meade explained there were several reasons for the increased number of people turning up at GP surgeries with diabetes. One was the ageing population (older people are at greater risk), and the second was the increased level of obesity in the population.
"I don't think diabetes care in this country would be as well-developed and as advanced as in other European countries. It's not well-resourced and it's not well-managed," said Dr Meade.
Anna Clarke, health promotion and research manager with the Diabetes Federation of Ireland, said it was unfair patients had to wait so long to access a diabetes specialist: "We need a strategy to look after the 200,000 people that have diabetes in Ireland."