People in Ireland are living longer as progress is being made on the treating of major causes of death.
But while mortality from most of the principal causes of death fell last year it increased for respiratory diseases.
Provisional figures from the Department of Health show that last year mortality rates for heart disease, strokes, non-respiratory cancers and suicide all fell.
But the number of people dying from respiratory illnesses rose slightly.
This is the eleventh edition of Health in Ireland: Key Trends published by the department.
The latest figures for life expectancy are from 2016 and are 83.6 years for women and 79.9 years for men - both are slight improvements from the previous year.
Other statistics show that while the number of acute beds in public hospitals increased it remains 10% below the 2008 level.
On waiting lists, the number of patients waiting for inpatient and day case elective procedures dropped by 24% in the 12 months from October last year - but that figure excludes people waiting for an endoscopy.
And the number of people waiting for outpatient procedures during that period rose slightly and is now over half a million - 150,000 of them have been waiting for more than a year.
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The overall mortality rate has reduced by 14.9% since 2008. As seen in most European countries however, the rate of improvement in Ireland's life expectancy has begun to slow in recent years.
The report touches on several areas, including demographics, population health, hospital and primary care, health service efficiency, employment and expenditure, and highlights the significant achievements that Ireland has made for key health outcomes in the past decade.
However, it also highlights the challenges that persist in terms of the accessibility of timely and efficient healthcare across the population.
Male life expectancy in Ireland has been above the EU average over the past decade. The life expectancy at birth for men in Ireland has been consistently greater than that of the EU average by over a year. Female life expectancy in Ireland matches the EU average.
In 2016, 83% of Irish men and women rated their health as good or very good. This is the highest in the EU and compares with an average of 70% and 64% for males and females respectively across the EU.
There have been improvements seen in survival rates from breast, cervical, colon and rectal cancer in the last 15 years. However, with the exception of rectal cancer, five-year net survival rates are lower in Ireland than the average for OECD countries where data is available.
There has been a 26% reduction in the mortality rate from suicide since 2008. After a rise in the male suicide rate from 2008 to 2012, the three-year moving average has decreased and the latest figures (2015) have fallen below the EU average for the first time since 2010.
Over half of Irish men binge drink on a typical day of drinking, compared to just under 20% of women in 2018. A gender gap is present across all age groups, but the highest rate of binge drinking is among the 15-24 age group.
The number of patients waiting for an inpatient or day case hospital procedure has fallen by 24%. The total number of patients waiting over nine months for an inpatient or day case procedure has fallen by 5,300 or 24% since October 2017, to 15,523 as of Oct 2018.
The busiest time for emergency departments is 11am to 2pm on a Monday. The highest attendances to hospital emergency departments occur between 9am and 5pm on weekdays, with Monday mornings between 11am and 1pm seeing the highest attendance volumes across the week.
Less than 2% of the population donate blood. Both the number of blood donations and the percentage of blood donors in the Irish population have declined in the past 5 years. The percentage of blood donors in the population in 2017 was 1.7%.
