Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent)
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221. To ask the Minister for Health when a person (details supplied) will have an operation; and if they can be referred to the NTPF scheme. [18596/18]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Under the Health Act 2004, the Health Service Executive (HSE) is required to manage and deliver, or arrange to be delivered on its behalf, health and personal social services. Section 6 of the HSE Governance Act 2013 bars the Minister for Health from directing the HSE to provide a treatment or a personal service to any individual or to confer eligibility on any individual.

The National Waiting List Management Policy, a standardised approach to managing scheduled care treatment for in-patient, day case and planned procedures, January 2014, has been developed to ensure that all administrative, managerial and clinical staff follow an agreed national minimum standard for the management and administration of waiting lists for scheduled care. This policy, which has been adopted by the HSE, sets out the processes that hospitals are to implement to manage waiting lists.

The recently launched Inpatient/Day Case Action Plan outlines the combined impact of HSE and NTPF activity in 2018 to reduce the number of patients waiting for treatment to below 70,000 in 2018. The Action Plan commits to offering treatment to all patients of high-volume procedures - specifically cataracts, hip/knee replacements, tonsils, angiograms, skin lesions and varicose veins - who are clinically suitable for outsourcing and who have been waiting more than 9 months for treatment.

The NTPF authorises public hospitals to offer outsourced treatment to clinically suitable long waiting patients who are on an inpatient/day case waiting list for surgery. These patients would have been referred on to such a list following clinical assessment by a consultant/specialist at an outpatient clinic. The NTPF advise that they cannot discuss details of individual patients. NTPF authorisations are made in respect of the longest waiting patients first.

In respect to the particular query raised, as this is a service matter, I have asked the HSE to respond to the Deputy directly.