David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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I will come back to Dr. Green. Constituents visit our clinics and ask us to raise issues of concern to them. Orthodontics is sometimes one of those issues, especially in the south east because waiting times for treatment are longer. I submitted a parliamentary question which I think Dr. Green responded to about waiting times in the south east. I was taken aback by the response, which broke down waiting times by year from 2014 to 2019. The average waiting time for routine orthodontic treatments across the south east in 2014 was 42 months. The average waiting time now is 60 months. In Waterford, my constituency, it was 37 months in 2014, 47 months in 2015, 51 months in 2016, then dropped to 47 months in 2017, possibly because of the national procurement process that the witnesses spoke about earlier, while it was 54 months in 2018 and 60 months now. How could 60 months be an acceptable wait time?