One in four people in the country are now on hospital waiting lists.
The figure reveals the health service is now in a “real state of crisis” according to Sinn Fein health spokesman, David Cullinane, who obtained new data from the HSE.
Health officials confirmed to him there are 1,325,180 people waiting for some form of operation or procedure or to see a consultant – the biggest backlog in the history of the State.
The huge build-up has come after two years of the country battling Covid, which left the health service dangerously close to bursting at the seams.
Mr Cullinane believes the queues reveal that the health service is in a permanent state of “crisis planning” and that staffing is a major problem.
He told the Irish Mirror it was “absolutely unacceptable” that there are so many vacancies unfilled by the HSE.
Mr Cullinane said: “The headline is that we now have more than 1.3 million people on some form of health waiting lists – that’s one in four people on some form of health waiting list.
“The vast majority, just under 900,000, are on an acute hospital waiting list, with over 600,000 waiting to see a hospital consultant, and the rest are on various inpatient waiting lists waiting for access to treatment.
“We then have over 200,000 on community waiting lists across a whole range of areas, from speech therapy, language therapy, occupational therapy, dietetics, audiology. Then we have a further 200,000 people waiting for a diagnostic scan.
“So, all of these things failing at the same time is resulting in people not getting the care and treatment that they need.”
And the Waterford TD said the staffing issues at the root of the waiting times backlog had to be urgently addressed.
He added: “What’s common across all of this is definitely staffing. We’ve known for a long time that we have a recruitment and retention crisis.
“We need a new recruitment and planning strategy that is not going to be short-term, we have to start looking at the long-term solutions.”
The HSE said in response that Covid-19 had presented the health service with “significant challenges” over the past number of years.
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