Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government is focusing on the priority areas in health. For example, reducing waiting times for the longest waiting patients is one of the Government's key priorities. It is for that reason that €20 million was allocated to the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, in the budget, rising to €55 million in 2018.

In order to reduce the numbers of long-waiting patients, the Minister for Health, as the Deputy will be aware, asked the HSE to develop waiting list action plans for 2017 in the areas of inpatient care, which the Deputy mentioned, and also scoliosis and outpatient services. The inpatient, the day-case and the outpatient plans focus on reducing the number of patients who are waiting 15 months or more for inpatient and day-case treatment or for an outpatient appointment by the end of October.

Working very closely with the HSE, the NTPF has been implementing waiting list initiatives to provide treatment for those who are waiting longest on the inpatient day-case waiting list. The August 2017 day-case and inpatient waiting list figures which were published at the beginning of September show that the total number of patients waiting has fallen by over 2,000. Every case of a person waiting is one too many but the Government is focusing on the range of initiatives which are making a difference and will make a difference in the long term. These include, of course, the bed capacity review which is really important and the GP contract so that we can have more focus on primary care centres.

Let me give Deputy Kelleher the statistics. Some 23,000 patients have come off the inpatient day-case waiting list and over 81,900 patients have come off the outpatient waiting list. Also, 237 scoliosis surgeries have taken place. The NTPF is rolling out the day-case initiative as well. That is focused on those waiting longest for day-case treatment. Right now, 2,000 patients have accepted an offer of treatment from the NTPF. All those initiatives are beginning to have the kind of impact we want to see.

Deputy Kelleher also mentioned the winter initiative. There is a range of initiatives to deal with the very real increase in referrals that takes place in the winter period. Following on from last year's winter initiative plan, the HSE, in conjunction with the Department of Health, developed a roadmap for improving the patient experience and to reduce the number of patients waiting for admission on trolleys in order to provide a better response. Each of the hospital groups has been working to progress a very proactive integrated approach around winter resilience planning for 2017-2018 to ensure that specific plans are in place for those predictable peaks of pressure that the Deputy has spoken about.

See this speech in context