Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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376. To ask the Minister for Health the number of public patients in each public and voluntary hospital who have been removed from outpatient lists to date in 2018 as a result of a validation exercise and not as a result of having an appointment with a consultant. [41903/18]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Good practice around the management of hospital waiting lists recommends periodic validation of waiting lists. Validation is the process whereby hospital administration contacts patients on waiting lists at pre-planned intervals during the year to ensure that patients are ready, willing, suitable and available to attend a hospital appointment or wish to be removed.

Importantly, the validation process allows for situations where, if requested by the GP/referring clinician, patients can be reinstated back to their original place on to the Waiting List.

In June, I approved the establishment of a Central Waiting List Validation function in the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF). The NTPF advise that the National Centralised Validation Unit was established in September. The establishment of the new Centralised Validation Unit will put in place protocols and practices which will ensure a standardisation of approach to the validation of all waiting lists across all hospitals.

Information provided by the HSE, in the following table, sets out the data requested by the Deputy.

OPD Validation Completed to date