Press Release: Friday 14 February 2025
Monthly waiting list figures – January 2025
The latest hospital waiting list figures for January published today by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) underline the progress achieved through the multi-annual action plan approach to addressing long wait times for care. The latest hospital activity report published by the Health Service Executive (HSE), demonstrates increased levels of hospital activity in the delivery of scheduled and unscheduled care services.
Today’s figures follow publication earlier this week of the Waiting List Action Plan (WLAP) 2025, by the Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD. The WLAP 2025 embodies the Government’s commitment to reducing waiting times for patients, thereby, improving access to hospital care.
The delivery of elective care in the early months of the year can be impacted by the winter surge in demand for unscheduled care and because of high levels of respiratory illness circulating. Therefore, the increase in waiting list volumes seen in the January figures is as expected and an anticipated multi-annual trend.
Notwithstanding the time of the year we still see progress being achieved in the figures published today, including in terms of those patients waiting longest. We’ve also seen significant longer-term improvements in waiting times since the multi-annual WLAP approach was initiated in September 2021.
The waiting time reductions achieved under the WLAP approach demonstrate sustained progress towards our ultimate goal of achieving the maximum waiting times set out in the 2017 Sláintecare report, e.g. 10 weeks for outpatients (OPD) and 12 weeks for inpatient and day case (IPDC).
Ireland’s acute hospitals are delivering higher levels of activity and treating many more patients than ever before. The latest hospital rolling 12-month activity report published by the HSE gives insight into acute activity levels, with millions of patients being seen and treated annually within our hospital service. The report outlines that there was c. 3.9 million OPD, and c. 1.9 million IPDC attendances during the period covered by the report. In comparison with the levels of activity delivered in the full year 2022, these figures represent increases of c. 14% for OPD and c.12% for IPDC activity.
In addition to this planned care, our hospitals also treated c. 1.8 million patients during this same period in emergency care, which represents a c. 10% increase on the full year 2022 and reflects the continuing demands on our hospitals.