Hanley: Health Minister needs to do more

Hundreds of thousands of outpatients waiting to see consultants, will be moved onto another waiting list for procedures, once they have been seen.

The number of Irish people waiting to be seen by specialists is likely to be around 200,000

Figures released yesterday from 30 of the country's hospitals, show that at least 178,000 are waiting.

But those facilities only represent about 72% of outpatients, since several hospitals haven't reported their waiting list figures to the HSE.

The Health Minister says we'll have a full picture of Ireland's waiting lists in the next couple of months.

Dr Ruairí Hanley says James Reilly needs to do more:

"The sum total of the effort on this issue seems to be to sum up how many people are actually on a waiting list and they haven't even managed to do that because the waiting list isn't complete", he said

"…collecting data shouldn't take a year anyway, so it's actually pathetic when you think about it. It takes the HSE a year to tell us how many people are waiting before they can actually do anything".