Hospital patients in Northern Ireland are forced to wait longer for treatment than the rest of the Britain, a damning new report disclosed today.
Nearly 6,900 people in Northern Ireland needing non-urgent operations experienced at least a 12-month wait, compared with none in Scotland and just over 550 in England, latest figures showed.
Five men and women had to wait more than a year for cardiac surgery, the Northern Ireland Audit Office study found.
The number of outpatients waiting more than three months for a first appointment has also spiralled by 457 per cent from 16,100 in March 1996 to about 89,700 in June 2004.
Auditor General Mr John Dowdall said: "Proportionately more people have to wait longer for their treatment than elsewhere."
The backlog was no surprise to British Medical Association Northern Ireland chairman Dr Brian Patterson, who has a patient waiting three years for a hearing check-up.
The Co Antrim-based GP nevertheless delivered a scathing verdict on the health service.
He said: "This is a sad indictment of the amount of money thrown at this problem doing cosmetic exercises like cleansing the lists.
"There are an enormous number of people waiting to get on to waiting lists.
"Twenty years ago we had a health service that was the envy of Britain, but we took a huge number of beds out and never put them back.
"People die on these waiting lists and that's worse than a crisis, that's a catastrophe." The report confirmed no major delay in the majority of cases, with 75 per cent waiting less than three months and 95 per cent less than a year.