Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 5 February 2025
1348. Deputy David Cullinane asked the Minister for Health the number of persons on diagnostic waiting lists at the end of each quarter of 2022 to 2024; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [3521/25]
Amharc ar fhreagraIn 2022, in line with actions in the 2022 Waiting List Action Plan (WLAP), the Department of Health issued formal approval to the NTPF to commence work on the development and delivery of a National Radiology Diagnostic Protocol. In October 2024, the NTPF formally launched the first National Radiology Diagnostic Waiting List Management Protocol for the administrative management of patients on radiology diagnostic waiting lists in Irish public hospitals.
As well as ensuring that patients seeking access to Radiology Diagnostic services are administratively managed in a safe, timely, fair, and equitable manner whilst waiting, by standardising the management of patients, the protocol will facilitate improved data collection and reporting about patients on Radiology Diagnostic waiting lists.
In the interim, the information that is currently being collected as part of a pilot project is 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.
In response to previous Parliamentary Questions, the Deputy has been provided with reports for each quarter in 2022 and 2023, as well as for the first two quarters in 2024. The reports for quarters 3 and 4 in 2024 are set out at the links below.
At the end of Quarter 4 2024, there was a total of 300,115 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).
