Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach painted a rather rosy picture of the Government's progress in addressing the problems of the health service. A very different picture was presented by the Irish Hospital Consultants Association on Friday in a press statement it put out, detailing that 893,000 people are now on some form of National Treatment Purchase Fund waiting list, that a further 250,000 people are waiting for diagnostic scans and that hospital cancellations could exceed 250,000 a year if the rate continues, with 85,000 operations and appointments already cancelled to the end of April. Emergency department attendances increased by 38%, or 461,000, over the past decade, with average wait times now approaching 12 hours, or double the target in 2013. The association stated this is the first time in six months that the number of people on the outpatient waiting list has totalled over 600,000. It asked about the announced rapid-build programme to deliver 1,500 additional beds, whether the €1 billion capital budget increase necessary to deliver this has been secured and whether the Government is committing to that.

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