What a shocker! RTE News told us Thursday that the number of people in Ireland who are on waiting lists to be treated or seen by a doctor has grown to a shocking number of over 707,000. This is an unbelievably huge number. 15% of the population of Ireland is waiting!! FIFTEEN percent!!
According to the Euro Health Consumer Index from 2017, the number of Irish patients waiting for surgery or an outpatient appointment is “abysmal”. They have concluded that Ireland has the WORST hospital waiting list in Europe.
It is not totally clear how RTE arrived at this number, but there is an Outpatient waiting list of 511,000 and an Inpatient waiting list of 78,000. There is planned procedure waiting list of 12,000 as well and adding all these up comes to around 600,000. so there are still 100,000 missing. But even if the waiting list was ONLY 600,000, that is still more than 12.5% of the population in Ireland.
If you are affected by this, check out the Cross Border Health Care Directive, this article in the Journal.ie outlines what it does.
