Omagh Hospital becomes Day Procedure Centre to tackle waiting lists

Omagh Hospital has been named as Northern Ireland’s second regional Day Procedure Centre, as part of an initiative to tackle waiting lists.

According to the Department of Health, Omagh Hospital Day Procedure Centre will see seven regional theatre lists per week across urology and general surgery – two specialities with some of the longest waits.

This means an extra 1,750 patients across these specialities will be treated per year when fully implemented. In addition 10 regional endoscopy sessions at Omagh Hospital will see an extra 3,000 patients per year.

Health Minister Robin Swann said that despite “ongoing budgetary uncertainty”, he has been able to allocate £46million for additional waiting list activity for the first six months of 2022/23.

This is in addition to the £90million he allocated last year that delivered over 216,000 patient contacts by the end of February. This included 35,000 new outpatient appointments, 120,000 diagnostic appointments and 13,000 in-patient day case treatment.

The additional funding for the start of 2022/23 involves creating additional in-house health service capacity over and above normal day to day work, as well as paying independent sector providers to assess and treat patients who are on waiting lists.

Mr Swann also announced additional recurrent investment of over £16million per year on boosting in-house health service capacity to treat patients.

“The realistic outlook for our overall waiting times position is a period of slowing growth before ultimately a sustained reversal as the decisions already taken on staffing and other investments in capacity begin to come to fruition,” said the Minister.

“Alongside the investment in buying additional capacity, we need to strengthen in house capacity on a major scale – to meet current and future needs.”