A leading surgeon said it will cost close to almost £1 billion to clear hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland over the next five years.
Niall McGonigle, the Northern Ireland Director of The Royal College of Surgeons in England, said that while £180 million was earmarked for waiting lists in 2021 and 2022, only £45 million was spent.
Dr McGonigle, a chairman at The European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS) and a consultant thoracic surgeon, said a large amount of funding is required to clear waiting lists across the health trusts.
Speaking on the BBC Sunday Politics Northern Ireland programme, Dr McGonigle said: “I think one of the problem is the amount of money that is required to clear waiting list, it really is significant. The Department of Health says it’s around £135 million per year for over a five year period, which is 675 million.
“They’ve talked about an additional 80 million once it is implemented. It’s unclear as to whether or not that forms part of the five-year plan as well, or only kicks in after the five years.
“So somewhere about a billion. We’ve been promised money in the past for waiting lists and in 2021, 2022 it was around about, I think about 180 million was given to waiting lists.
“However, only about 45 of that ever made its way to waiting list. The rest was used for red flag referrals and time critical surgery instead.
“So there is a large amount of money required to clear waiting lists, and what we’ve been offered in the past hasn’t actually got that far.”
Alliance MLA Nuala McAllister said that some outpatients would be willing to travel outside their own health trust area if it meant they could be seen quicker.
The North Belfast MLA said: “I think the bigger actual issue here is that everyone agrees transformation is important until it hits their area.
“I’m talking about people who live in Belfast or who live in Fermanagh, they have a very different idea of what transformation could look like because they are thinking about their outcomes.
“I perfectly understand that, it’s right that people would think about better outcomes for them, but I think the issue for everyone has to be that we remove politics from health transformation, that we actually have a system that is about better outcomes for each individual patient.
“That means that should a person wait two years for a first time appointment in their local area, or would a person be willing to travel that bit further, whether you live in Belfast or further afield or not, if they could have that appointment in three months time.
“I think most people would agree that they would much rather travel that little bit further, but get seen quicker.
“I think this is part of the overall picture of health transformation.”