Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am very pleased to do that. The National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, has a budget of €75 million for 2019, which is an increase on last year again. We managed to reduce the overall number of people waiting for inpatient day cases, hospital operation or hospital procedure to just below 70,000 in 2018. The aim is to reduce the figure to just below 60,000 in 2019. This year, we should continue to see reductions in the number of patients waiting overall. What is probably more important, which we never really get to discuss, is the length of time somebody is waiting. We are projecting that, currently, at the start of this year there were 40,200 people waiting for more than three months for operations, and the Sláintecare target is three months. We will reduce the figure to 31,000 people by the end of the year. We will reduce the number of patients longer than nine months for an operation from 14,900 to 10,000. This year, the NTPF funding will pay for 25,000 additional inpatient day case treatments and 5,000 scopes.

We are trying a relatively new initiative this year. For the first time in quite a while the NTPF will be used to fund first appointments for outpatients. The NTPF will carry out 40,000 outpatient first appointments this year. By the end of the year we should see the outpatient list lower than it was at the beginning of the year but an awful lot of work remains to be done. We are getting to a much better place for inpatient day cases. The number of patients now being seen in under three months or less for hospital operations is improving all of the time. The number of people waiting on the list overall is improving all of the time.

Outpatients, being very honest, are the big bulk or overwhelming amount of our waiting lists. This is where the Sláintecare stuff starts coming in. I am not suggesting there is a panacea here; there is not. If we are starting to fund GPs over the next four years to do more in chronic disease management that, potentially, removes people from our outpatient waiting lists. If we are looking at, through the Sláintecare integration fund, new and innovative ways of treating things like ophthalmology, one may be able to take some of that out of the hospitals. There is a lot of work. Last week or the week before, I chaired a meeting for a couple of hours and discussed how do we get on top of outpatient figures. We keep talking about a global figure but we need to look at the specialties of which ophthalmology is a big part. In a lot of ophthalmology cases if one can see someone at the outpatient clinic one can nearly do a see and treat, and be done, rather than putting somebody on an outpatient list, getting them seen eventually but then having to go somewhere else for the inpatient or day case procedure. We have a lot more work to do with outpatient figures.

To directly answer the question, the NTPF has a budget of €75 million. It will see the inpatient day case waiting list overall reduced to under 60,000 people by the end of the year, and it will see the reductions and times that I have outlined.