Northern Ireland outpatient, inpatient & diagnostic waiting times
Published by Department of Health (Northern Ireland) · Official source
Update schedule
- Quarterly (published roughly one to two quarters after the period).
Level of detail
- HSC Trust (Health and Social Care Trust)
What we show
- Total patients waiting for a first outpatient appointment per HSC Trust, all specialties combined
- Total patients waiting for inpatient or day-case admission for treatment, summed across the day-case, inpatient and day-admit management types
- Total patients waiting for a diagnostic test, summed across every diagnostic service and category
- For each of the three, the number and share waiting more than 52 weeks — NI's Ministerial waiting-time target is 100% of patients seen within 52 weeks
Caveats
- Northern Ireland runs its health service separately from England, Scotland and Wales, and publishes only a >52-week breach measure — it has no 18-week (England), 26-week (Wales) or 12-week (Scotland) RTT-style waiting standard, so these figures are NOT comparable across nations and are never ranked together.
- Reported per HSC Trust, not per hospital — Northern Ireland does not publish these datasets at hospital level. NI's five geographic trusts are Belfast, Northern, South Eastern, Southern and Western.
- Outpatient, inpatient/day-case and diagnostic waits come from three separate Department of Health publications measuring different things on different bases; they are shown side by side but never summed together.
- The Northern Ireland-wide outpatient and inpatient totals also include DPC (a non-geographic dental/primary-care category with no trust of its own), matching the Department of Health's own published NI-wide totals; DPC has no trust page on this site.
- We parse the 'encompass' sheet of each source workbook, the basis all trusts currently report on; a historical 'Pre-encompass' sheet covering earlier periods under a different methodology is not ingested.
- The over-52-week figure sums every published waiting-time band from 52 weeks upward (52–65, 65–78, 78–91, 91–104 and 104-plus weeks for outpatient and inpatient; 52–65, 65–78 and 78-plus weeks for diagnostics).
- The >52-week share is shown for diagnostics for consistency with the other two care types, but NI's own diagnostic-waiting target is much shorter than 52 weeks — read the diagnostic figure as the share of the diagnostic waiting list waiting more than a year, not as performance against NI's diagnostic standard.
- NI's outpatient waits are the longest of any UK nation — read these alongside the England, Scotland and Wales waiting-time pages, never merged with them.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.