The aims of the NSP2023 are to build further on hospital and community services capacity, improve access to services, including women’s healthcare and mental health services, enhance prevention and early intervention work, take forward the work of the Waiting List Task Force, and implement improvements in the security and resilience of critical national infrastructure.

As we work to build back service capacity affected by Covid-19, we will also continue to support Sláintecare reform and finalise design and commencement of initial implementation of the six Regional Health Areas (RHAs) in 2024.

Key Priorities for 2023

Hospitals: Additional general acute beds will come on stream in 2023, bringing the total increase since 2020 to 1,179 by end 2023 along with additional critical care beds, bringing the total to 352 by the end of this year.  These figures can fluctuate for operational and service reasons. We will continue to deliver safe, timely access to hospital care by implementing a range of measures to ensure better access to unscheduled care, improved cancer care and prevention, and to build on proven waiting list initiatives and ambitious waiting time targets have been set for outpatients.

Community: The Enhanced Community Care Programme (ECC) will continue to roll out nationally to ensure more people can access healthcare in their local community rather than within the acute hospital setting.  These measures include the continued development of 96 Community Healthcare Networks, each servicing a population of c.50,000, 30 community specialist teams for older persons and 30 community specialist teams for people living with chronic disease as well as increased access to community diagnostics (up to 240,000 community radiology tests and 266,500 tests across areas such as echocardiography, spirometry and natriuretic peptide blood tests).  23.9million home support hours will be delivered to 55,910 older persons in 2023.

Mental Health: With an additional budget of €14.0m in 2023, we will see an increased number of 12,635 CAMHS referrals, a 17% target increase since 2019.

P.45 Social Inclusion Services

Social inclusion services, informed by a human rights-based person-centred approach, improve health outcomes for socially excluded groups in society. Improvement in health outcomes is achieved by promoting, enabling and advancing an inclusive health service, enabling initiatives in health service design and delivery and contributing to addressing health inequalities. We will continue to progress this work by increasing the numbers able to access drug and alcohol services across all regions, providing better supports for children and families affected by parental drug and alcohol use and ensure more women and Health and Social Care Delivery National Service Plan 2023 42 men are in recovery from addiction. We will continue to work to reduce drug-related harms, overdoses and drug-related deaths. We will ensure an additional 269 Housing First tenancies receive intensive health supports. We will provide better treatment for chronic physical health conditions amongst Travellers and work to promote increased awareness among Travellers of the main causes of acute health conditions and increase access, participation and outcomes to appropriate health services for Travellers through the expansion and strengthening of the Traveller health care infrastructure. We will expand the Creative Ireland Traveller Health Initiative to other areas nationally and prepare five-year regional and national detailed implementation plans for the National Traveller Health Action Plan, 2022-2027 (NTHAP). We will work to ensure more refugees, international protection applicants, beneficiaries of temporary protection and migrants access culturally appropriate healthcare services.