360,000 hospital appointments in Galway cancelled or postponed during pandemic
From this week's Galway City Tribune - More than 360,000 hospital appointments and procedures were postponed or cancelled at University Hospital Galway during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It has fuelled fears of thousands of delayed diagnoses, and delayed treatments, including for cancer patients.
The new figures indicate that about 500 appointments were postponed or cancelled on average every day at the city hospital during a 23-month period that included months of Covid lockdowns.
Chris Kane, General Manager of UHG, confirmed that a total of 362,013 hospital appointments were cancelled or postponed at UHG from January 2020 to November 2021. This includes day-cases, inpatient, and outpatient appointments.
Aontú – who obtained the figures through a Parliamentary Question – warned the cancellations would result in a significant number of delayed diagnoses and delayed treatments, including for serious illnesses such as cancer.
Ms Kane’s figures confirmed that 225,734 of the cancelled and postponed appointments in 2020 and 2021 were due to the hospital. Some 109,219 were put off by the patient.
And just over 27,000 cancelled or postponed appointments were because of a ‘major event’, which includes the HSE cyber-attack.
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