He can point to improvements in waiting lists or record spending or new initiatives and recite them chapter and verse, seemingly at will.

His command of the numbers and his ability to sell his Government's — and his own — performance in health is impressive, even if it strays into management consultant speak. Of course, the stats don't always tell the full story.

The Department of Health last week trumpeted its July waiting list figures, saying there have been "significant reductions in the number of patients waiting longest". There has been about a 30% reduction in the total number of patients waiting over 18 months since this time last year and since the pandemic peaks, there has been about a 24% reduction in the number of people waiting longer than the Sláintecare targets, which equates to about 148,000 people.

It puts this down to a multi-annual waiting list plan which is bearing fruit.

However, the figures in the HSE’s national scorecard on waiting times for procedures released last month show it is failing to meet the target of 90% for inpatient adults waiting less than nine months for an elective procedure, at just 73.6% of cases, with the same figure for children at 63.6%. 

For example, in terms of cancer treatment, the HSE has a target that 90% of patients would undergo radical radiotherapy treatment within 15 days of being deemed ready by an oncologist. Just 63.1% of patients did so.

So even though Mr Donnelly has figures at his fingertips, the reality of the overall health system is complex. There are millions of people on waiting lists, tens of millions of procedures and more than 20,000 staff across the health system, so there is some argument that taking it as a monolith doesn't always tell the full story.

But where Mr Donnelly's stats and the broader scope of issues are much clearer is in Limerick.

The issues at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) have bedevilled this Government and could become the millstone around its neck when the issue of health is debated during the next election.

That is not to say Mr Donnelly has not made efforts.

As far back as April 2022, he ordered the HSE to deploy an “expert team” to University Hospital Limerick as part of an emergency plan to ease crisis levels of overcrowding at the hospital. That was some eight months before the death of Aoife Johnston, before which Mr Donnelly said he had had "concerns" about rostering at the hospital.

Since then, Mr Donnelly has been forced to furrow the brow and speak about the need for change at UHL on a number of occasions, most recently this week, when he said “there must be” improvement for patients being cared for at the hospital this winter. However, he said reform at the hospital was difficult due to the ongoing need to "firefight".

Now we have a major problem in UHL. The five hospitals with the biggest number of patients on trolleys represents half the national figure.

“Where capacity and reform have happened, the trolleys have fallen right down in some places to zero. Where capacity has happened without reform, we’re not seeing the results for patients, it must be both.” 

He said the reforms suggested for UHL had not been fully implemented “partly because they’ve been under so much pressure for so long that it is simply more difficult to do reform when you’re firefighting all the time”.

This follows comments in May where Mr Donnelly said he was "not satisfied" with the hospital's situation, which itself followed a visit he made to the hospital in April which found doctors "burnt out" and countless other comments on UHL over the last two years.

In May, Mr Donnelly said there were 29 emergency departments in the country and "we probably spend 90% of our time talking about one of them". 

He is right and he surely knows that the case of one hospital threatens to overshadow all of the work he has done. The political reality of UHL is that it will overshadow any number of figures.