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Hospital Waiting Lists Data

Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 5 March 2020

Thursday, 5 March 2020

Questions (820, 821)

Louise O'Reilly

Question:

820. Deputy Louise O'Reilly asked the Minister for Health the overall national radiology waiting lists by hospital and scan type, that is, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs; and the breakdown to the level of waiting lists for brain scans, pelvic ultrasounds and so on by hospital. [3592/20]

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Louise O'Reilly

Question:

821. Deputy Louise O'Reilly asked the Minister for Health the radiology scans which are not captured by HSE data; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3593/20]

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Written answers

I propose to take Questions Nos. 820 and 821 together.

The HSE advises that a pilot project commenced in 2016 by the HSE Acute Hospitals Division to progress the collection of national radiology waiting list data. The project has been supported by the Radiology Clinical Care Programme and has involved key stakeholders across the system including the National Integrated Medical Imaging System (NIMIS) Team, Hospital Groups, and the support of the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) for data collection and data management expertise.

The information requested by the Deputy is outlined in the documents attached, which set out waiting list data for Quarter 4 2019 for CT, MRI and Ultrasound. The HSE advises that, at present, the further breakdown to the level of brain scans, pelvic ultrasounds etc. requested by the Deputy is not yet captured as part of this project.

The information that is currently being collected is presently being tested and validated at hospital, hospital group and national level and as such should not be used/reported without the context of the caveats set out below:

- Data is subject to inclusions and exclusions which are documented in the Data Profile Document. This document is available from Acute Operations and has been circulated to all Hospital Groups.

- Data contains urgent, routine and surveillance/planned activity which is currently not broken down in detail, as such this includes surveillance/planned activity which may not be exceeding planned date.

- Data is still undergoing validation at Hospital and Hospital Group level.

- Data does not take into account local nuances at site level (Site profile developed to support understanding of same).

- The purpose of this aggregate data is to provide a National Level overview of the number of patients waiting for modalities of CT, MR and Ultrasound.

- This report is not intended to be used for the active management of hospital diagnostics waiting list, local reports and mechanisms should continue to be used for the management of diagnostics waiting lists at hospital level.

In Q4 there were a total of 184,293 patients reported on the waiting list from all sites, this represents all outpatients waiting, urgent, semi urgent, routine and planned/surveillance (where diagnostic access is planned at particular time intervals).

Diagnostic Report

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