Almost 557,000 patients are waiting for a first hospital consultation and thousands more have joined the queue over the last two months, it has emerged.

As 597 admitted patients waited for a bed in the country's public acute hospitals this morning, Health Minister Simon Harris announced that up to 190 beds will be opened in the coming weeks.

The HSE has reached an agreement with the National Treatment Purchase Fund to open 190 beds over the coming weeks, the minister told a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health.

A long-awaited pricing review looking at the fee structure within the nursing home sector is finally set to be published.

The NTPF doesn't record the reasons why, but the Irish Patients Association says the audit suggests some patients may have got sicker and have presented to an emergency department instead.

There is €26m for a winter plan to deal with emergency department overcrowding in acute public hospitals, Simon Harris, the health minister, has confirmed.

Almost 68,000 people were waiting for an appointment for an inpatient or day case treatment at the end of September.

The accuracy of waiting list figures published by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has been called into question by a consultant who said the official figures were a “tenfold under-estimation” of the actual situation vis-a-vis his own specialty.

With the Brexit crisis overshadowing events,today is a budget day like no other.

The number of patients waiting to see a hospital consultant has reached a new record high of almost 570,000.

Latest waiting list figures from the National Treatment Purchase Fund show that they continued to climb this month, reaching 558,484 last week.

More than half a million people are waiting for their first hospital out-patient appointment.

Major shortcomings in how waiting lists are managed by some hospitals have been found in an audit published by the Department of Health.

The body representing nursing homes is warning policymakers that changes are required to meet the needs of the country’s aging population, and has increased its lobbying of TDs for measures it wants to be implemented.

An “aggressive and unfair” validation of outpatient lists has been used to achieve a reduction in figures, a GP group claims.

A review of how the National Treatment Purchase Fund negotiates prices with private and voluntary nursing homes under the Fair Deal scheme is almost complete.

All patients waiting more than nine months for “high volume” operations or procedures are to be offered treatment by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF).

The Government is set to radically reform the way hospital wards are staffed and structured after a new pilot project found simple changes can reduce deaths, improve patient outcomes, and save the State millions of euro a year.

Serious maladministration, identified in public hospitals where patients are skipping the queue at the expense of other possibly urgent cases, must be tackled immediately, Social Democrats TD Róisín Shortall has urged.

There were 494,530 patients last month waiting to be seen by a consultant at out- patient clinics, a reduction of just 788 on the previous month, new figures show.

Three hundred and fifty people will die needlessly in hospital emergency departments next year unless Health Minister Simon Harris definitively addresses the trolley count crisis in next week’s budget.

Latest: The Fianna Fáil Spokesperson on Health has called on the Government to act on increasing hospital waiting lists.

Approximately 3,400 procedures are being cancelled in public hospitals every month, according to the latest figures.

Not a single hospital has been fined for failure to implement a policy that is supposed to reduce overcrowding in emergency departments — at a time when numbers on trolleys are at record levels.

Not a single hospital has been fined for failure to implement a policy that is supposed to reduce overcrowding in emergency departments — at a time when numbers on trolleys are at record levels.

Irish hospitals may soon be unable to guarantee “routine” services as a basic right to patients due to the severe strain record-breaking new waiting list figures are putting on the system.

Publication of a blueprint to overhaul the delivery of eye care services is almost a year behind schedule at a time when ophthalmology inpatient/day case waiting lists have outstripped all other specialties leading to avoidable sight loss in some patients.

Women with serious gynaecological problems including incessant bleeding, fibroids and painful sexual intercourse are increasingly turning to their GPs and TDs to lobby for them in a desperate bid to access treatment at Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH).

If being ‘ashamed’ and ‘heartbroken’ over hospital waiting lists is the best Simon Harris can offer, the issue will never be resolved, suggests Health Correspondent Catherine Shanahan.    

Ten orthopaedic surgeons, six anaesthetists, four operating theatres, one military base in Hanoi — just some of the logistics involved in organising the kind of joint replacement blitz the NTPF could only dream of.

The flu death toll so far this winter is 29, and 90% of those victims are aged 65 or over.

A number of politicians have welcomed what appears to be a breakthrough in finding a solution to tackling excessive gynaecological waiting lists at Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH).

Health Minister Simon Harris has vowed to “dramatically reduce” waiting lists in the first six months of next year.

Minister for Health Simon Harris has said that the number of patients on waiting lists for the longest period has begun to decline.