Fianna Fáil has described the situation as “a national scandal”.
It has been revealed that there were 997,258 patient appointments outstanding in Ireland as of the end of June 2018.
Of these, over 148,000 outpatients have been waiting over a year for an appointment.
A spokesperson for the National Treatment Purchase Fund said: “The health service will treat 3.3 million outpatients this year and deliver 1.7 million hospital operations or procedures, outside of the additional work under the National Treatment Purchase Fund.
“Of the 1.7 million procedures, an estimated 435,000 are from the waiting lists.”
Fianna Fáil party’s deputy leader Dara Calleary has described the situation as “a national scandal,” saying: “The very fact that there are almost one million people waiting for an appointment speaks for itself. Never before have we seen a situation whereby people have been failed so badly by a government.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, UCC health economist Brian Turner also said he would have a lot of concerns about the funding of new healthcare implementation plan, adding that the removal of private patients from public hospitals would improve waiting list figures significantly.
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