Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

As I said yesterday, as in every health service in the world, there are clearly some difficulties in some areas of health, although not in a large proportion of areas. I acknowledge what has been achieved: a 7% increase in day care cases to over 590,000, an increase in outpatient attendances to more than 2.766 million, over 1.2 million attendances at accident and emergency departments and substantially reduced waiting times. Treatment is provided for 150,000 cancer patients and treatment is provided for 17,000 inpatients and appointments have been arranged for 9,000 outpatients under the National Treatment Purchase Fund.

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