Review of acute hospital services in the Mid - Health Service Executive

Review of acute hospital services in HSE Mid-West
An action plan for acute and community services
Appendix 4 – Current service delivery in the Mid-
West
To assess how this model of ‘best practice’ care fits with the current profile of services and
what may need to change, we need to understand the demographics of the population and
the delivery of current services 48 .
Resident population
HSE Mid-West covers an area of 7,879 square kilometres and has a resident population of
360,650. This administrative catchment includes the counties of Limerick, Clare and North
Tipperary, and Limerick City. The resident population of each county is shown in Table 20.
The 2006 population figures show an increase across the whole HSE Mid-West area of 6.2
per cent.
Table 20: Resident Population by County
County Census 2002 Census 2006 % Change
Limerick City 54,023 52,560 -2.7
Limerick County 121,281 131,303 8.3
Clare 103,277 110,800 7.3
North Tipperary 61,010 65,988 8.2
HSE Mid-West Total 339,591 360,651 6.2
Source: Census 2006 Preliminary Report, Central Statistics Office, July 2006
This table shows that there has been a significant increase in population numbers across all
counties in the last four years except for Limerick City where there has been a reduction.
County Limerick and County North Tipperary have experienced the largest growth in resident
population of over 8 per cent. The Central Statistics Office has forecast to 2021 that the
national average annual growth rate in population will increase by 1.4 per cent in Ireland. The
growth rate forecast for the Mid-West is lower than this, at 0.8 per cent per annum from 2006
to 2021.
48 CAUTION – The assessment of the current acute service delivery is based on available information at a point in time and
which is on a consistent basis for all the acute hospital services in HSE Mid-West.
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