A senior hospital manager in Cork has defended waiting list times for MRI scans.

Gerard O Callaghan is the Chief Operating Officer at the South West Hospital group.

He has said there are now only 315 patients waiting for an MRI scans at Cork University Hospital, down from almost 3,000 in July of last year.

Following some criticism from local GP’s about access to the scans – Mr O Callaghan said 87% of routine patients are now seen within 12 months.

“The system itself isn’t perfect at the moment and the resources that we have available to us just allow us to deal with the public patients there are two MRI scanners now in CUH.

Both of those are owned by the public system and are run by a private company and there is a service level agreement as to how that operates.”