Figures showing more than 20,000 hospital operations were cancelled in the State last year may be significantly underestimated, a leading hospital consultant has said.
Mr Kevin O'Malley, chairman of the medical board of the Mater hospital in Dublin and a consultant vascular and general surgeon, said he was pleased to see the cancellation figures published this week. But he questioned whether the data released by 30 hospitals included all instances of cancelled surgery.
"These figures may be grossly underestimated. In the Mater hospital, and probably the other Dublin hospitals, patients requiring urgent surgery are not booked in advance but are booked on a day-to-day basis and do not appear in the statistics.
"Certainly the figure of 800 cancelled operations at the Mater is a gross underestimation," Mr O'Malley said.
The consultant surgeon said a distinction had to be made between planned surgery for the treatment of varicose veins or the removal of a gall bladder, for instance, and surgery for urgent cases such as treatment of an abdominal aneurysm.
"In an ideal world, patients assessed as needing urgent surgery would be given a firm date before they leave the outpatient department. However, what happens in reality is that I and my colleagues struggle on a daily basis with the admissions office of the hospital to get people in for urgent surgery."
Asked what happened to these patients when their surgery was cancelled, Mr O'Malley said in the region of 10 per cent became emergency cases and had to be admitted through the emergency department. This figure included patients requiring urgent cancer surgery, he said.
Mr O'Malley added: "Our capacity to carry out urgent major surgery effectively is greatly hindered by our bed capacity."