Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not quite sure what Deputy Howlin was talking about when he referred to people spending more than six months in accident and emergency departments. I think he may have been mixing up patient experience times in accident and emergency departments and waiting times and waiting lists for people who are waiting for an operation or a special appointment. Those figures are collated independently by the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF. The numbers of people waiting for hip, cataract, eye, knee and similar operations as well as angiograms and similar types of procedures have been falling for well over a year.

The figures I tend to look at are for those waiting for more than three months. There will always be tens of thousands of people waiting for a procedure for four, six or eight weeks. That is also the case for people who go private and it is certainly the case in any public health service across the world. For this reason, the figure I tend to look at is for those waiting more than three months. That figure has gone down from more than 60,000 in July 2017 to about 48,000 now. I may not be 100% accurate because I do not have the figures in front of me. We know, however, that the average waiting time for those operations and procedures is now less than six months. Much progress is being made in respect of operations and procedures.

To answer the Deputy's question, there is a long-standing protocol in the health service that when emergency department overcrowding reaches a certain point elective operations and procedures are cancelled or not scheduled in the first place. This is often the case during the busiest period.

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