Private hospitals received nearly three times as much from the State as their public counterparts to clear public patients from waiting lists last year, new figures show.

Also, the total spend last year by Health Minister James Reilly's Special Delivery Unit (SDU), which is tasked with reducing waiting lists and ED trolley waits, was cut by nearly 90% in 2013.

According to figures released to irishhealth.com, a total of €4.82 million was spent last year on cutting waiting times for public patients, with the vast bulk of the funding spent on operations and procedures to take patients off treatment waiting lists.

However, a total of just under €42 million was spent by the SDU in 2012 on cutting waiting lists. The total spent in 2011 was just over €65 million.

The figures show that private hospitals received €3.57 million from the SDU for public waiting list work in 2013, compared to €1.25 million given to public health board and voluntary hospitals.

In 2012, private hospitals received €16.1 million, while public hospitals received just under €26 million to clear waiting lists.

The National Treatment Purchase Fund, which was set up in 2002 to help clear waiting lists, was effectively amalgamated with the new SDU by Minister Reilly in 2011. The running of the SDU has since transferred from the Department of Health to the HSE.

The Minister at that time ended the requirement that 90% of treatments for waiting list patients be purchased in the private hospital sector. However, the figures show that a sizable portion of the waiting list initiative work is still contracted out to the private sector.

It is not clear if the figures above include a major outpatient waiting list drive at the end of last year, in which thousands of patients were given outpatient appointments in the private sector. This resulted in around 50,000 patients being cut from outpatient lists between November and December last.

However, since then there has been a 230% increase in outpatient waiting lists, while treatment waiting lists,  which were reduced last year, have also started to spiral upward again.

The above figures do not include a sum of €18 million allocated from general HSE funds last year to tackle overcrowding bottlenecks in some hospital emergency departments.