Hospital waiting lists rose sharply last month as the trolley crisis forced the cancellation of thousands of scheduled appointments.
A record 545,000 patients were on public waiting lists by the end of January, according to the latest figures published by the National Purchase Treatment Fund (NTPF).
The surge in waiting lists will place additional pressure on Minister for Health Simon Harris and the HSE following a week dominated by concerns over the misery suffered by long-waiting patients as well as controversy over what figures are actually published.
The new figures show the number of people waiting more than 12 months for an outpatient appointment or inpatient treatment is rising again after a brief dip in recent months.
The NTPF says that in addition to the published lists, there are an additional 26,108 patients on a pre-admit list. These patients are scheduled to be seen within six weeks, though this does not always happen.
In addition, 60,930 patients are on the planned procedure list. These are patients who have been scheduled for treatment such as a test at a future date.
Unpublished
However, the list includes 8,743 patients who are recorded as being planned with a date “in the past”. This means that more than 632,000 patients were on published and unpublished hospital waiting lists at the end of January.
The number of patients on the outpatient list, which is published monthly, rose to 445,701, up over 8,000 on the end of last year. This is the biggest increase for many months. Some 94,711 of these patients have been waiting for an appointment for over a year, more than 10,000 higher than in December.
There are 82,005 patients on the inpatient/daycase list, up 1,000 in a month. The number waiting over 12 months grew by almost 2,000, to 14,604.
Endoscopes
The number of people waiting for gastro-intestinal endoscopes was up slightly, at 17,441, but only 354 of these patients are waiting longer than 12 months.
University Hospital Galway alone has over 35,000 patients waiting for an outpatient appointment, and 11,600 waiting for inpatient treatment.
There were 539 patients waiting for admission to hospital on trolleys or in wards on Wednesday morning, according to the daily count by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.
