Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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163. To ask the Minister for Health the number of public patients that have been removed from outpatient lists to date in 2019 as a result of a validation exercise and not as a result of having an appointment with a consultant for each public and voluntary hospital in tabular form. [52232/19]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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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 from the list. The validation of waiting lists can help provide clean, accurate, up to date waiting list data which reflects the true demand for hospital services.

The National Centralised Validation Unit (NCVU) advises that since its establishment in November 2018 and up to the end of October, they have completed 236 validation cycles, across 36 hospitals, resulting in over 229,000 patients being contacted and over 40,500 patients being removed from the Inpatient/Day Case and Outpatient waiting lists.

The outstanding hospitals have engaged with the NTPF and have been allocated a time slot for validation in the next 3-6 months.

In relation to the data requested by the Deputy, the NCVU provided the attached document which outlines outpatient validation figures by hospital.