David Cullinane
Question:1626. Deputy David Cullinane asked the Minister for Health the number of persons on diagnostic waiting lists at the end of each quarter of 2022-2024; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [15439/24]
View answerTuesday, 9 April 2024
Questions (1626)
Written answers
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 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, MRI 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.
The NTPF provides my Department with Quarterly reports which set out waiting list data for CT, MRI and Ultrasound. The HSE advises that, at present, further diagnostic scans (including cholangiopancreatography, electroencephalogram, angiogram, electrocardiogram and bone scan), are not yet captured as part of this project.
I have provided the Deputy with reports for each quarter in 2022 and 2023 in response to previous Parliamentary Questions. The most recent report available for Quarter 4 2023 was provided to the Deputy in response to Parliamentary Question No. 397 of 15 February 2024.
At the end of Quarter 4 2023, there was a total of 260,009 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).
To ensure that Deputies have access to these quarterly diagnostic reports as soon as they are available, my Department will put an arrangement in place whereby the reports can be provided to Deputies once they have been received from the NTPF, and will contact the Deputy directly in this regard.