Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

If the Deputy wants to come to the House and criticise everything in the health service then so be it, but I will give him some of the facts of the situation. As I said, 120,000 work in the health service and they deal with 100,000 patients per month. Both the adult and children's waiting lists, as produced by the HSE, are at record lows right across the system. Some 100,000 inpatient and day care procedures are carried out in public hospitals every month — in excess of 1 million annually. Even if 41,000 is the figure — as I said yesterday, I do not know if it is — it is comparatively low against the figures from last year, three years ago, five years ago or ten years ago. It is a much smaller proportion of the total figure.

There will always be people on waiting lists. The National Treatment Purchase Fund, which issued a report recently, states there has been a consistent pattern of reducing surgical waiting lists throughout the public hospital system over recent years. The report points out that, for most common procedures, adults and children now wait between two and five months, compared to between two and five years some five years ago.

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