Some patients have to wait over two years for the next available appointment for an MRI scan at Dublin's Tallaght Hospital, new figures show.

And there are also long delays for many other diagnostic tests at the hospital.

Concerns over the growing waiting times for access to MRIs was recently raised at hospital board level in Tallaght.

Figures provided by the hospital to irishhealth.com show that a patient requiring a routine MRI scan, having been referred for it by a consultant at outpatients, has to wait 816 days, or two years and three months, for the test to be carried out.

The next routine appointment for a patient needing a CT scan at Tallaght, having been referred from outpatients, is 392 days - one year and one month.

A patient referred from Tallaght outpatients for a routine ultrasound will have to wait 330 days - nearly a year.

Patients referred for urgent MRI scans from outpatients will get the scan done within 14 days, Tallaght Hospital told irishhealth.com, while urgent cases would get a CT or ultrasound carried out within a week.

The figures also show that while GPs can directly refer their patients to Tallaght Hospital for ultrasounds, these patients will have to wait 330 days for the next available appointment for these scans. The wait for an urgent GP ultrasound referral is seven days.

A report from the hospital's Quality, Safety and Risk Management Committee recently raised the issue of long waits for MRI scans with the hospital board, according to board minutes.

A spokesperson for the hospital told irishhealth.com that Tallaght had invested significantly in equipment replacement over the past three years to address some of the waiting times for diagnostic tests.

This investment, the hospital said, included four new ultrasound machines, and providing a new interventional radiology room and a new CT scanner. A second MRI scanner would be commissioned at hospital in June of this year, the spokesperson said.

The installation of this scanner 'will assist in significantly reducing the waiting times for patients', the hospital said.