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

We will talk about that another time. To answer the Deputy Butler's question, from the patient point of view, which is what really matters, we have made considerable progress in reducing waiting times for operations and procedures. We lost some ground as a consequence of the nurses' strike, but the number of people waiting more than 12 weeks for an operation or procedure has been falling for well over a year. At the end of last year, it was at a four or five-year low. We lost a little time because of the nurses' strike, but we will catch up on that. We are not making progress on outpatients. We need to see if the approach we used to reduce waiting times for operations and procedures might be applied to some outpatient specialties such as ENT, dermatology and ophthalmology where we could buy in expertise from the private sector if we need to do so.

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