Cathal Crowe
Ceist:778. Deputy Cathal Crowe asked the Minister for Health the number of patients admitted to hospitals (details supplied) in 2024; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [15568/25]
Amharc ar fhreagraTuesday, 1 April 2025
Ceisteanna (778)
Freagraí scríofa
Data on the number of hospital admissions has been sourced by the Department of Health from the HSE Healthcare Pricing Office, Hospital Inpatient Enquiry (HIPE) dataset.
HIPE is a health information system designed to collect demographic, clinical and administrative information on all inpatient and daycase discharges from acute public hospitals in Ireland. Each HIPE discharge record represents one episode of care and for a patient with multiple admissions in a year, each admission is counted separately. Data is recorded on discharge from hospital and refers to the year of discharge (which may differ from year of admission in some cases).
HIPE includes data on all admitted inpatient and daycase discharges but does not include patients who attend an Emergency Department but are not admitted to hospital. It also does not include outpatient appointments.
HIPE data for 2024 has not yet been finalised and the data provided is provisional and should be treated with caution. Data is provided for both coded and uncoded discharges and has been rounded to the nearest thousand. Provisional data on total discharges for the named hospitals is listed below and further detail is attached.
• Beaumont Hospital: 131,000 (p)
• Cork University Hospital: 134,000 (p)
• Galway University Hospital: 142,000 (p)
• St. James' Hospital: 90,000 (p)
• St. Vincent's University Hospital: 104,000 (p)
• University Hospital, Limerick*: 89,000 (p)
*Data for UHL does not include University Maternity Hospital, Limerick which is recorded separately on HIPE. For Cork University Hospital and Galway University Hospital, maternity discharges are included.
For all listed hospitals, provisional data on the total number of discharges in 2024 is higher than the number of discharges in 2023.