Ms Yvonne Goff:

The aim of our longer term, multi-annual approach is to focus on the long waiters, to have a ramp-down profile to achieve the Sláintecare targets over the next four or five years. This year we had the targets set at 18 months for outpatients and 12 months for inpatients but we accept that these wait times are still unacceptably long. Going into 2023, we will further reduce that by bringing down the target for inpatient day case to nine months and for outpatients to 15 months.

The Senator has referred to patients who are waiting extraordinarily long periods for pain relief. Working with Mr. McCallion's team we have weekly calls with each of the specialties to try to understand the issues.

The issue is not the 600,000 people waiting specifically at specialty level. There are 668 specialty teams and we must work with each of them to understand their specific issues to put in place the longer term capacity they need to clear the backlog and also to be in balance.