Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 14 July 2022
846. Deputy David Cullinane asked the Minister for Health the number of patients removed from National Treatment Purchase Fund waiting lists as a result of validation for each month to date in 2022, in tabular form; the numbers by reason for removal; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [39413/22]
View answerAs the Deputy will be aware from my previous responses on this issue, including Parliamentary Question No 404 of the 23rd June 2022 (PQ 33335/22), and No 874 of 12th July 2022 (PQ 37406/22), the validation process is carried out through cycles where the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) works with individual hospitals, via specified waiting lists, in order to identify appropriate patient cohorts to validate, generate reports, contact patients, allow for response time, response collation, and patient removal. As such a breakdown of validation figures by hospital each month does not reflect the appropriate activity and removal rates of the validation cycle. In addition, to generate such a report would require significant manual intervention as it does not correlate with how the validation process operates in practice.
The NTPF has advised my Department that the number of patients removed from Acute Hospital Waiting Lists through their validation programme year to date up to end June 2022 was 3,942 from Inpatient/Day Case and 45,561 from Outpatient waiting lists.
In relation to the numbers by reason for removal, the NTPF does not currently collate data on the reasons patients respond that they no longer require the appointment or procedure.
