A new public dashboard reveals the Irish health service delivered its highest ever number of patient appointments in 2024, with emergency presentations surging by 22% compared to 2019 levels.
The Minister for Health has published an interactive dashboard that provides unprecedented transparency into health service productivity data, detailing investment, workforce numbers, hospital activity and performance across the entire system.
The dashboard reveals significant increases in healthcare delivery during 2024, with four million outpatient appointments representing a 19% increase on 2019 figures. Day-case appointments reached 1.2 million (a 13% rise), whilst inpatient appointments totalled 690,000 (up 8%). Most notably, emergency presentations climbed to 1.8 million, marking a 22% increase from pre-pandemic levels.
Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD, Minister for Health, 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.”
The Minister highlighted concerning productivity trends, noting that hospital consultants were seeing fewer patients per year in 2024 compared to 2019, despite significant investment increases. The dashboard will track key metrics including outpatient appointments per consultant and average hospital stays.
Minister Carroll MacNeill added:
“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. 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 new tool displays comprehensive data covering changing demographics driving healthcare demand, expenditure and workforce statistics, hospital activity trends with pricing adjustments, productivity metrics, and specialist care waiting lists. The publication builds on national and regional analytics released in 2024, now providing hospital and specialty-level insights with interactive functionality for the first time.
The dashboard supports the Programme for Government 2025’s commitment to embedding productivity in patient care whilst ensuring complete transparency in published health data.