Press Release: Thursday 26 June 2025
Minister for Health publishes interactive productivity dashboard for all hospitals
The Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill T.D., is today publishing an interactive dashboard of important health service productivity data and insights, detailing healthcare investment, workforce, activity and performance across the health service.
The Programme for Government 2025: Ensuring Ireland’s Future commits to embedding productivity in patient care and ensuring full transparency in published data. Today’s publication builds on analytics published in 2024 at national and Health Region level to provide insights at hospital and specialty level while adding interactive functionality.
In 2024, the health service delivered four million outpatient appointments, representing a 19% increase on appointments delivered in 2019. In addition, there were 1.2 million day-case appointments (13% increase), 690,000 inpatient appointments (8% increase) and 1.8 million emergency presentations (22% increase).
Minister Carroll MacNeill said:
“Greater productivity means faster access and better health outcomes for patients. A key theme of the Programme for Government is productivity, and transparency is crucial to achieving this goal.
“In 2025, we are investing €10 billion in our public hospitals. This dashboard will help the public understand what this level of funding delivers. It will also serve as a tool for healthcare managers and clinicians to identify areas of best practice and underperformance by specialty, hospital, and region. As a system, we need to become more agile in learning from and investing in areas that are performing well and addressing any barriers to increasing productivity.
“We are focusing on several productivity indicators over the next year, such as the number of outpatient appointments per consultant and the average length of stay in a hospital.
“The data shows that prior to 2019, an average hospital consultant was seeing more patients per year than in 2024, despite significant increases in investment. We need to understand why this is happening and what can be done to support the system in delivering efficient and better patient care.”
The dashboard is now available publicly and displays data relating to:
- Changing demographics driving increased demand for healthcare.
- Expenditure and workforce.
- Hospital activity trends with adjustments for unit price of delivery.
- Trends in productivity enabling metrics such as average number of patients seen per consultant.
- Waiting lists for specialist care.