Hospital discharges by diagnosis — Waterford
43,728, latest 2025 (+3.7% year on year).
The count stood at 43,728 in 2025. That is 3.7% higher than a year earlier. That is the highest value in the published series, which begins in 2017. Its low point was 33,413 in 2020; the latest reading is 31% above that. Other measures for the same year: infectious and parasitic diseases 789, neoplasms (cancer) 3,413, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases (incl. diabetes) 713, mental and behavioural disorders 268, diseases of the nervous system 848, diseases of the circulatory system 2,127, diseases of the respiratory system 2,441, diseases of the digestive system 3,868, diseases of the musculoskeletal system 2,083, diseases of the genitourinary system 1,792, pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium 1,897, injury and poisonings 1,895.
Before you use these figures
- This counts hospital stays, not people: Each figure is a discharge -- one completed hospital stay -- not a person. Someone admitted more than once in the year is counted once per stay. A rise can mean more people needing care, or the same people needing it more often.
- Counted where the patient lives, not where they were treated: Area is the patient's usual county of residence, not the hospital's location. Major hospitals, mostly in Dublin and other cities, routinely treat patients from other counties, and those discharges are counted under the patient's home county here. This measures the hospital care residents of a county needed, not how busy that county's own hospitals were.
- These 12 groups are about half of all discharges: The diagnosis groups shown here cover roughly 52% of all hospital discharges -- between 51.6% and 53.6% in every year from 2017 to 2025, and between 46% and 62% for any individual county and year. They are twelve of the twenty-one ICD-10 chapters, chosen for relevance, so nearly half of all discharges fall into a group not shown at all. The largest omission by far is "Factors influencing health status" (ICD-10 Z00-Z99) at 28% of all discharges: hospital contacts such as dialysis and chemotherapy sessions and follow-up care, which are recorded against the reason for the visit rather than a disease. "Symptoms, signs and abnormal findings" (R00-R99), where no more specific diagnosis was reached, is another 9%. Read the groups shown as twelve separate trends, never as a breakdown of the total beside them.
- One diagnosis per stay: Principal Diagnosis is the single condition judged chiefly responsible for that hospital stay. Other conditions the patient had at the time are not counted here even if also treated, so this understates the true burden of any condition that is often secondary rather than the reason for admission.
- A curated selection of diagnosis groups, not the full breakdown: CSO publishes discharges across a much finer 169-category hierarchy than shown here, with each broad chapter (for example "circulatory system") containing its own more specific rows (for example "heart failure"). The chapters shown are a selection of the broad groups, chosen for relevance -- they do not add up to "All causes", which is shown as its own figure, and summing the chapters shown would both double-count (some chapters overlap hierarchy levels in the source) and undercount (not every chapter is shown).