Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats)

With regard to some of the clinical targets, the then Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, wrote to the HSE last year to request that outpatient clinical targets for individual consultants, departments and specialties be agreed. This was in the context of budget 2025 and the need to maximise productivity. Have these been actioned? The new dashboard shows the number of consultants and the number of outpatient appointments per consultant. Are there targets? Some of the data is interesting.

In 2016, there were 1,812 consultants. In 2024, there were 3,061. However, the number of appointments per consultant fell from 1,686 in 2016 to 1,209 in 2020. Since 2020, the number of appointments has plateaued at 1,200. If consultants were operating at the same level of productivity as ten years ago, 1.5 million more appointments could have been held last year, which is extraordinary.