Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising important issues relating to our health service. She has touched on a number of topics and made a point about recruitment that I want to respond to as well. She began by referencing University Hospital Limerick. I, too, welcome the decision by the Minister for Health and the HSE chief executive yesterday to send a specific support team to Limerick to help to deal with the current pressures that are being experienced in that hospital and the mid-west region more generally. This team will begin its work immediately and over the next four weeks, it will help to devise a number of actions to ease overcrowding and pressures that are being experienced in UHL. The team is made up of Ms Grace Rothwell, the national director of acute hospitals, Ms Orla Kavanagh, director of nursing and integration at Waterford University Hospital, and a very eminent and, I think, respected individual by Members across this House, and the retired emergency medicine consultant, Dr. Fergal Hickey from Sligo. The team will work with the team in place in the hospital to manage patient flow and to de-escalate the current pressures being experienced.

The reason we are doing that is that we acknowledge the issues, despite very significant investment in that hospital. Those include staffing at the hospital increasing by more than 1,200 since the end of December 2019, going from 2,800 staff to more than 4,000 at the end of March, which is a 43% increase in staffing levels in University Hospital Limerick, including 162 more doctors, 53 more hospital consultants, 447 more nurses and midwives and 119 more health and social care professionals. These are large numbers of additional people working on the front line. Despite their exceptional work and hard efforts, many of us in this House and I, as Taoiseach, have significant concerns about UHL. We eagerly await the report from retired Chief Justice, Frank Clarke, about what I think will be instructive recommendations on how to proceed.

More generally, the Deputy talked about the recruitment embargo. A recruitment embargo would suggest that nobody is being recruited and gives the impression that staff numbers are not growing in the health service. Of course, as she and I have discussed many times over the past few weeks, they are. When you talk about an embargo, you are actually talking about asking the health service to hire more doctors, nurses, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, more people to work in disability services and more people to work in our mental health services. There will be more people working in each of those areas at the end of this year than there were at the end of last year. We are also saying there has to be some reality and some correlation between the funding given to any public organisation and the number of people it employs. Actually, for anyone watching at home, please know that this Government has given the health service enough funding to hire 2,268 additional people this year. When disability services are included, for which the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has responsibility, the Government has provided funding to hire 3,000 additional people this year. Unless we want to adopt an approach where we bring the Ministers for Justice and Education in and tell them they do not have a budget anymore, living within a budget and having some correlation between a workforce plan and a budget is something that many taxpayers watching will see is a responsible thing to do.

We have significant challenges with overcrowding. In a number of hospitals, we have seen significant improvements over the course of this year and last year. Now, the Minister for Health, with the HSE, is eager to see how the good practices in terms of patient flow can be embedded in some of the hospitals, particularly UHL, which are not going nearly as well.

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