David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Short-term waiting lists were never going to work and I have said for some time that winter plans are simply window dressing. They were also never going to work and the winter plan failed spectacularly this year. The Minister’s short-term waiting list plan for the year gone promised to take 132,000 people off waiting lists but it only took 10,000 people off waiting lists. The target that was set was modest but we came nowhere near that. The number of people waiting over 12 months and over 18 months decreased, and I welcome that, but there are still over 170,000 patients waiting over a year. However, the length of time that people are waiting in accident and emergency departments in some hospitals is crazy.

I got the following details from a response to a parliamentary question I put to the Minister. The average wait time for patients over 75 in Cork University Hospital in December of last year was 40 hours. Let that sink in; the average wait time for all patients over 75 in a major hospital in this State was over 40 hours. How can anybody stand over that? Why are there so many variations between hospitals such that in a major hospital like Cork University Hospital we can get it so wrong that this is the average wait time for patients over 75?

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