The Health Service Executive says Waterford Regional Hospital is a success for women in the region despite details of an unpublished report disputing this claim.
Waterford Regional Hospital was designated as a centre of excellence for the treatment of breast cancer.
In a statement to RTÉ, a spokeswoman for the HSE said the report is only a snapshot in time.
She added that the Health Information and Quality Authority did not get certain documents relating to standards at the hospital because they did not exist.
According to a newspaper report the hospital is said to have failed to have met three quarters of the national standards.
The Irish Times article says the unpublished report into facilities and organisation at the hospital shows many of the failures are due to a lack of resources.
HIQA found that the hospital was meeting just eight of 48 criteria of a well-functioning specialist disease centre.
A further four criteria are uncertain. Among the areas highlighted are: 95% of patients not being given a date for surgery within three weeks, insufficient mammograms being carried out and a lack of evidence of sufficient new patients being treated.
95% of biopsies are recommended to be image-guided and Waterford Regional lacks the scanner for such procedures.
The report, which is not concerned with the abilities of staff, shows that only one specialist breast cancer surgeon is at the hospital instead of the two required.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Health has said that standards were set for the first time two years ago and she doubted that at that time any of the eight centres would have met those standards.
However, Mary Harney said many of the issues identified in Waterford by the study carried out last year have since been addressed or are being addressed.
