Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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150. To ask the Minister for Health the action he will take to address the long outpatient waiting times in University Hospital Limerick in which 5,360 persons are waiting more than 18 months for an appointment. [43568/18]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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In Budget 2019 the Government has prioritised improving access and reducing waiting times for patients, with funding to the National Treatment Purchase fund (NTPF) increasing from €55 million in 2018 to €75 million in 2019, of which, €6 million will be committed to outpatient activity.

To date in 2018, the NTPF has approved almost 12,700 additional first-time outpatient appointments and this is projected to increase to 40,000 appointments next year. I recently met with the CEOs of all hospital groups to discuss improving access for patients and requested that they work with the NTPF and HSE in 2019 to develop innovative proposals to address the number of long waiters on outpatient lists in 2019.

Outpatient waiting list figures for the end of September for University Hospital Limerick show that there were more than 29,000 patients waiting for a first outpatient appointment, of which 69% are waiting less than 12 months.

More broadly, the HSE advises that the University of Limerick Hospital Group is working to provide a range of insourced outpatient clinics across a wide range of specialties including dermatology, endocrinology, gynaecology, ENT, and many more. These clinics will actively work to reduce the longest waiting patients across those specialties with the largest waiting lists.

In addition, the Central Waiting List Validation function, which was established in the NTPF last month, will deliver a standardised approach to validation across all hospitals in line with best patient-centred practices. This new function will have many benefits including the identification of patients on waiting lists who are ready and available to proceed with hospital care, the reduction in the Did Not Attend rate (DNA), and an improvement in information for managing waiting lists. The NTPF estimates that 30,000 patients who no longer require treatment will come off the outpatient waiting list in 2019 as a result of this activity.