Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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308. To ask the Minister for Health further to Parliamentary Question No. 163 of 12 December 2019, the number of removals from the outpatient list which were as a result of a patient being deceased. [53623/19]

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.

The NCVU has confirmed that the NTPF does not collect specific patient personal reasons for removal as a result of validation.

The 2 categories for validation removal collected by the NTPF are:

- Patient requests removal from the waiting list

- Patient removed from the waiting list due to non-response

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