Around £7 million has been spent sending Northern Ireland cardiac patients for surgery outside the region in the past year due to a lack of local capacity, a medical charity said today.

Nearly a third of procedures (440 of 1,430) had to be carried out in England or the Republic, according to Northern Ireland Chest, Heart and Stroke.

While the cardiac specialists at the Royal Victoria Hospital are on track to meet their target of 1,000 heart operations in the financial year (they had completed 990 by the end of March), the charity said more government funding was needed to ensure all surgery is done locally.

Each operation in Dublin costs Stormont’s Department of Health £17,000, with procedures in London priced at £14,000, said Andrew Dougal, chief executive of NICHS.

He said it would be more cost-effective to spend the money increasing capacity at the Royal.

“When we have one of the best heart surgery hospitals in the UK, it makes no sense to send away a third of our operations to other parts of the UK or Ireland,” he said. “This means exporting jobs which in the present employment situation in Northern Ireland could be seen as imprudent.

“We congratulate the Royal on gearing itself up to meet the target of 1,000 operations a year. But it is clear that patients and their families like to be close to home during such major surgery.

“The fact that the Royal has managed to reach 1,000 operations each year should convince the government that it’s worth investing the extra funds to allow it to complete the additional 440 procedures.”

Mr Dougal said there was a need for more medical, nursing and technical staff at the Royal.

“We recommended as long ago as 1992 that Northern Ireland needed up to 1,500 cardiac operations a year. Despite the introduction of other procedures such as angioplasty with stenting, the need for heart surgery has increased.

“The answer to the problem is simple, but it demands confidence in our own cardiac surgery teams to deliver.”