Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government appreciates and understands that we have enormous challenges in our health service particularly when it comes to access, overcrowding in our emergency departments, the fact that many patients have to wait far too long to see a specialist or far too long for the operation or procedure they need.

There are other truths as well. When we ask 14,000 of our patients, as we do every year, how they rate their experience of our health service, 85% of public patients say they rate our public health service highly, that their experience is good or very good or even excellent. When it comes to patient outcomes, for example, we see big improvements in survival rates for cancer, heart attack and stroke over the past five to ten years happening because of new technology and the hard work of our front-line staff and Government investment and policies behind them. For example, on the issue of overcrowding, today 297 patients await a hospital bed. That is down 24% on this day last year and down 20% on the same day two years ago. If one looks at the HSE special delivery unit, SDU, official numbers, month on month, there has been a decrease in the number of people waiting on trolleys every month since May.

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