Letter: Time for the Department of Health to get its act together

In fact, this option has always been open through something called the Extra Contractual Referral procedures of the local Department of Health’s strategic planning and performance group.

The problem is that these procedures actively obstruct patients from being sent to England where waiting lists are shorter and the costs are often lower.

They basically want to keep patients in Northern Ireland unless a procedure is not available here.

How can it be cheaper to send patients to England?

There are two reasons:

The Northern Ireland Fiscal Council found that elective procedures are, on average, at least 20 per cent more expensive than in England.

English health authorities charge us for treatments using something which was called the national tariff and has recently been renamed the NHS payment scheme.

This divides up treatments into categories of related procedures, and then calculates the average cost.

The more complicated procedures within a category cost English health authorities more than the average, but they only recover from us the national tariff charge.

Here is an example. I was sent to England for a more complex procedure.

Under a Freedom of Information Act request I established that the sum charged to the health authorities here was less than half of the actual cost.

Now the Department of Health is blocking me from continuing this treatment.

The Department of Health has been asleep at the wheel in identifying cheaper treatments in England, which can also be carried out more quickly than in Northern Ireland because of our dreadful waiting lists.

To compound this, it has maintained a set of procedures which actively obstruct patients from being sent to England if they so wish.

Is the Department of Health now going to get its act together?

Dr Paul Kingsley, Belfast