There are now nearly 712,000 people on some form of hospital waiting list, new official figures show.
The Department of Health said that waiting lists in June were about 25,000 ahead of the target for the year to date. It said this was due to a larger than anticipated number of people being placed on waiting lists for hospital treatment.
“While we have seen improvements in the longer waiting patients and in terms of average waiting times, unfortunately higher than anticipated levels of additions to waiting lists has resulted in the volume of patients waiting across lists remaining too high,” the department said in a statement.
“At the end of June there were 711,799 people on the total hospital waiting lists. In the last year, although there have been slight decreases in the outpatient department and gastrointestinal scope waiting lists, the total waiting list has increased by under 1 per cent (4,411).”
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It said while the numbers removed from waiting lists were slightly higher than the target, additions were about 7,500 higher than projected. “This has resulted in the waiting list being about 25,300 above target year-to-date,” it said.
The department said there had been a reduction of about 34 per cent in the total number of patients waiting over 18 months since this time last year. It said there were now 475,407 people waiting longer than the 10- and 12-week targets, while 236,392 people are waiting within the target times.
It said that as at the end of June a total of 52,629 people were exceeding the 12-week inpatient and day-case procedure target, which represented a slight decrease of 17 people in total compared to the end of last month and was about 1 per cent higher than the end of June last year.
The figures showed there were 412,868 people waiting longer than the 10-week target for an outpatient appointment. This represented an increase of about 1 per cent compared to last month but was down about 4 per cent on the figure for June 2023.
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