It does not take a civil servant to quantify in facts and figures how bad Northern Ireland’s hospital waiting list crisis has become.
The evidence is all around us. If you are fortunate enough not to be waiting for an appointment or procedure yourself, there will almost certainly be someone in your family or circle of friends who has been languishing for years in a backlog for treatment.
Often these involve chronic conditions, with severe consequences for the patient’s ability to live an active, productive life, with the knock-on effects for the economy that entails.
Officials from the Department of Health put a number this week on the scale of investment required to address delays that are the shame of any society in the western world.
Dr Tomas Adell, its director of elective care and cancer policy, told an assembly committee that over five years, it would take £80 million annually to deal with demand and up to £135m annually to clear the backlog – an investment of more than £1 billion.
Of course securing such funds is highly unlikely in the current financial climate, with minister Mike Nesbitt recently warning that health and social care is “at the limit of what can be achieved this year without causing catastrophic harm”.
Northern Ireland has the worst hospital waiting lists in the UK, with more than a quarter of the population waiting for an inpatient or outpatient appointment.
Dr Adell said structural reform is required, including the establishment of elective care centres, as well as a cultural shift to end practices such as patients automatically staying overnight after surgeries or returning to see consultants after treatment.
Reconfiguration of hospital services, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, would also improve efficiency by allowing centres to specialise.
Mr Nesbitt this week detailed a three-year plan for the sector based around themes of stabilisation, reform and delivery.
Among the priorities is a pay deal for overstretched staff, while health trusts will be challenged to deliver tens of thousands more outpatient assessments each year. A new obesity framework and proposals for minimum alcohol pricing are also planned.
However, helpful as some of these measures may be, patients would be forgiven for saying they have heard all of this before.
The reality is that successive Stormont administrations have overseen the virtual collapse of large areas of the health service and refused to commit to the necessary reform programmes clearly mapped out by experts in a series of reports.
The real cultural shift required is at a political level if we are ever to recover from years of neglect and give patients the modern, safe, efficient health service they and the staff working within it deserve.
