The Minister for Health is travelling to Scotland to view an elective-only hospital tasked with reducing waiting lists.

Earlier this month, figures revealed that almost 192,000 people are waiting for inpatient or day case appointments in Irish hospitals, including more than 7,000 children.

A further 514.000 people are waiting for an outpatient appointment. Over 82,000 of these have already been waiting for at least 18 months.

Under the National Development Plan 2018-2027, the Government has committed to building three new dedicated elective hospitals in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The aim of these will be to provide high volume, low complexity procedures on a day and outpatient basis.

This will increase capacity in the hospital system ‘and provide a better separation of scheduled and unscheduled care', according to the Department of Health.

Minister Simon Harris is visiting the state of the art Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Glasgow in order to learn more about the Scottish experience of providing care via elective-only hospitals.

"Health systems across Europe face many similar challenges, such as ageing, chronic disease, antimicrobial resistance, delivering homecare and community care. We in Ireland are keen to learn from other health systems as we reform our services, and to share our own lessons learned," Minister Harris said.