Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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I will get the Deputy a note on how many operations have happened this year, both in HSE and private hospitals. The NTPF puts out bids asking, say, who wants to perform 20 hip replacements or 100 cataract operations. Public and private hospitals can bid if they feel they have spare capacity or they want to ramp things up. Given the length of the waiting lists, I would like us to be more strategic and ambitious next year, so I am putting together an access to care task force. There is a pot of €340 million. I want as much of that as possible to go into the public hospitals, but the private hospitals can be used too, and start to go through the list of more than 700,000 to establish the priority groups. Rather than putting out bids as we do now, that we might say we have so many thousands waiting on orthopaedics, ear, nose and throat procedures, cataracts, etc. and see if we can get that down.