per head in the province at £2,200 a year was much the same as the rest of the UK the performance of the system was much worse. Using the NHS targets more than 20% of patients waited more than 4 hours in A&E departments, and sometimes 30%. About 16% of the population were on a waiting list, compared with around 7% for the rest of the UK. More than 64,000 of them, around a quarter, had been waiting over a year for their first outpatient appointment. In the last 16 years there had been 7 government reports calling for a move to more stress on prevention and away from hospital based care. In 2018 hospital performance in the province was worse than the rest of the United Kingdom. All the five trusts failed their targets for A&E, cancer and routine operations for the whole of 2017–18. The Northern Ireland Audit Office reported in December 2018 that "the health and social care system, as currently configured, is simply unable to cope with the demands being placed on it." There is a deficit of £160 million and waiting times were unacceptable. None of the NHS targets have been met since 2015. 204 patients died in hospital in 2018 while waiting to be discharged largely because of a lack of domiciliary care packages. The BBC reported the case of a woman with multiple health problems who moved from County Armagh to Swansea and said the doctor she encountered in Bristol "was shocked" at the standard of medical care she had received from the Southern Health and Social Care Trust. 205 homeless people in Northern Ireland died in an 18-month period, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism accounting for more than 25% of the 800 homeless deaths in the UK. Northern Ireland's population of 1.9 million is 2.8% of the UK total. One in five Northern Irish cancer patients get their cancer diagnosis while attending an emergency department. This happens because some patients wait too long on hospital lists and get taken to an emergency department instead. Heather Monteverde of Macmillan Cancer Support described the statistics as, "shocking and extremely worrying". Monteverde said emergency departments are unable to give the highly specialised care cancer patients need and added just 55% of Northern Irish cancer patients begin treatment within the 62-day target, and the number was, "deteriorating month-by-month". Cancer patients presenting via emergency departments