Paul Connaughton Snr (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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Question 109: To ask the Minister for Health and Children her views on the findings of the Euro Health Consumer Index Report which stated that waiting times here were among the worst in Europe; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [24082/07]

Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)
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I am aware of the findings of the Euro Health Consumer Index Report. A small section of the report deals with waiting times for operations for public patients within the Irish public hospital system. This is one indicator out of twenty-seven in the report and one of five used by the authors to reach their conclusions on the overall "waiting time" experience of Irish patients.

The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) was set up in 2002 to reduce the length of time public patients wait for operations. In the past five years, significant progress has been achieved in this area with waiting times for the most common procedures down from two to five years to the current two to five months. According to the most recently published (July 2007) data from the Patient Treatment Register operated by the NTPF, waiting times for nineteen of the twenty most common adult procedures are four months or less. For eleven of these procedures, waiting times are three months or less.

The Euro Health Consumer Index Report focuses on four sample procedures out of thousands currently provided in the public hospital system and compares waiting times for these against a benchmark of three months. According to the Patient Treatment Register, current waiting times for the four procedures within these specialties are:

Hip replacement — 3 months

Knee replacement — 4 months

PTCA (angioplasty) — 2-3 months

Coronary Artery Bypass graft — 2-3 months.

The NTPF continues to work to reduce the length of time public patients wait for operations. Treatment through the NTPF can usually be arranged within a matter of weeks.