David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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241. To ask the Minister for Health the mean, median, and maximum wait time on NTPF reported waiting lists by speciality by location for quarter 1 and by month in each of the years 2019-2023, inclusive, in tabular form. [20889/23]

David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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242. To ask the Minister for Health the number of children on NTPF reported waiting lists by specialty by location for quarter 1 and by month in each of the years 2019-2023, inclusive, in tabular form; and the mean, median, and maximum wait time. [20890/23]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 241 and 242 together.

It is recognised that waiting times for many scheduled appointments and procedures were too long before and have been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Department of Health continues to work with the HSE and the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) to identify ways to improve access to care. On the 7th March, I published the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan, which is the next stage of a new multi-annual approach to sustainably reduce and reform hospital waiting lists, and builds on the foundational work done through the short-term Waiting List Action Plan between September and December 2021, which was followed by the first full year Waiting List Action Plan for 2022, both having reversed the annual trend of rising waiting lists.

The 2023 Plan sets out the priorities to continue to address waiting lists this year. The 30 actions in the Plan, which are governed by the Waiting List Task Force, focus on delivering capacity, reforming scheduled care and enabling scheduled care reform.

For 2023, funding totalling €443 million is being allocated to tackle Waiting Lists with €363 million of this being allocated to the 2023 Waiting List Action Plan, to implement longer term reforms and provide additional public and private activity to clear backlogs exacerbated during the pandemic. This will reduce hospital waiting lists by 10% in 2023 as well as continuing to significantly reduce waiting times in line with Sláintecare recommendations. The remaining €80 million of the €443 million is being targeted at various measures to alleviate community/primary care waiting lists.

With this ambitious 2023 Waiting List Action Plan, my Department, the HSE and the NTPF are taking the next steps in the multi-annual approach towards achieving our vision of a world-class public healthcare system in which everyone has timely and transparent access to high-quality scheduled care, where and when they need it, in line with Sláintecare reforms.

In relation to the particular queries raised, the attached tables, provided to my Department by the NTPF, show the number of patients on outpatient and inpatient/day case waiting lists, by hospital, by specialty at the end of each month in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and to the end of March in 2023. The document also includes a report providing a breakdown of the number of children on the same waiting lists by specialty and by hospital for the same time periods.

The NTPF has advised that the health system does not collect the data necessary to calculate average wait times. In particular, the time to treatment of patients who have already received their care is not collected. The NTPF collects data on patients currently on the waiting list and the average time that these patients have been waiting is provided here. The NTPF has further advised that in order to mitigate against identification or self-identification of individuals, they have excluded records where there are <5 patients waiting in a particular hospital specialty.

David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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243. To ask the Minister for Health the number of people aged over 65 and over 75 years on NTPF-reported waiting lists by specialty by location for quarter 1 and by month in each of the years 2019-2023, in tabular form; and the mean, median, and maximum wait time. [20891/23]

Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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As this is an operational matter, I have asked the Health Service Executive to respond to the deputy directly, as soon as possible.