Limerick East): Demand for orthopaedic operations in the Western Health Board regions has grown in recent times due to a variety of reasons including an increasingly elderly population, changing lifestyle patterns resulting in more accident and trauma cases and advances in the specialty itself.
Under the 1995 waiting list initiative I allocated a total of £709,097 to the Western Health Board which included funding for the provision of additional inpatient and outpatient orthopaedic procedures. As a result of this additional funding the board provided an additional 480 inpatient and 1,623 outpatient orthopaedic operations in 1995. This brought the total number of procedures performed in the year to 6,045 made up of 1,034 in-patient procedures and 5,011 outpatient procedures.