Nearly three quarters of a million people were on hospital waiting lists in August.
According to the National Treatment Purchase Fund, over 500 thousand of them were outpatients while around 50 thousand children were also waiting to be seen.
A third of these children have been waiting for over a year.
The highest outpatient waiting lists were at Galway University Hospital, University Hospital Waterford and the Mater in Dublin.
Stephen McMahon from the Irish Patients Association says the figures are worrying ahead of winter:
"we did a risk assessment on the impact on patients lives the stress on the frontline staff members and so on, it would call for urgent action if it was in any other place"
