No-one in Northern Ireland can be under any illusion about the shocking length of waiting lists for what should be routine hospital treatment.
If you have not been languishing on a list, awaiting investigation of a complaint or a procedure to improve your quality of life, then you will certainly have a family member or neighbour in that unenviable position.
The inability of our health system, as currently constructed, to meet rising demand in an era of financial constraint and political dysfunction makes the mockery of its founding vision to make healthcare freely available on the basis of need rather than ability to pay.
Nevertheless, some of the headline figures published in an audit office report today still make for stark reading.
The number of people waiting for an initial outpatient appointment, inpatient treatment or a diagnostic test stood at a staggering 696,000 in March this year – almost three times the figure in 2014.
More than half were waiting more than a year for treatment, compared to just 14 per cent in 2017.
And we know that in many cases patients with chronic conditions are waiting much, much longer, perhaps five or six years for something that could take weeks if they have money to pay.
The north's waiting lists are the worst in the UK and officials admit that targets to cut times will not be met.
Of course the solutions have been set out in numerous reports over the years. Yet while some good work as been done, including the development of dedicated elective care centres, a failure to provide long-term budgets to ensure the investment and reform required to create a truly sustainable service means the situation is only likely to become worse.
As Comptroller and Auditor General Dorinnia Carville points out, lengthy waiting lists only leave patients at risk of developing more debilitating and complex conditions, potentially requiring more expensive treatment, alongside the damaging impact on mental health and people's ability to life a full and active life.
For all the progress recognised by the Good Friday Agreement anniversary earlier this year, the state of the health service remains a devastating indictment of devolution's inability to deliver public services people are entitled to.
A failure of politics has helped put us in this perilous position. When DUP delegates gather this weekend, they must also resolve to be part of the solution by returning to Stormont and allowing an executive to finally make health its number one priority.
