Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Kelleher. I bow to her expertise in this area. She knows the sector very well.

I refer to the Cinderella charge. I do not want to dismiss legitimate criticism and problems the Senator outlined but in terms of what we are spending on the social care division - we may have to have a conversation about how this translates into services - the disability budget is €1.5 billion, the fair deal budget is €1 billion and there is another €700 million budget for older people. This is linked to my opening statement, in which I said we need to make sure funding is spent in the correct manner to deliver the services that people actually want to see delivered.

Senator Kelleher and Councillor Tracey convinced me that is not the case. People I have met have told me they are not seeing the service they want to be delivered. They have come up with better ways of delivering their own services within the same level of resources. A detailed body of work has been done.

I cannot get into specific Estimate discussions because discussions between my Department and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform are ongoing but the area of home care and home help remains an absolute priority for me and the Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, as the Senator knows. She is continuing to engage and I hope I showed some good faith in terms of the winter initiatives where, as the Senator said, we increased the number of home care packages quite significantly, by another 950, in recognition of the points she made. There is a significant correlation between the inability of someone to act as a home care package and the likelihood of that person ending up in hospital and remaining there for much longer than he or she medically needs. We are ad idem on that. How we translate that into benefits on the ground is what we need to work on.

As the Senator has outlined, some people have very complex needs, and have the right to be cared for in their community and home and to live in their home and community for as long as they possibly can. The rigidity of the current system is something we need to examine. The Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, is doing a considerable amount of work on this and I hope we will be able to show, in the multiannual sense, as discussed previously, incremental progress to get us where we need to get to.

I will examine gynaecology waiting lists in Cork and revert to the Senator in terms of ascertaining the current situation. My Department is scoping a winter waiting list initiative for 2017. If we get what is committed to in the programme for Government in the ongoing Estimates process in terms of waiting lists, we will examine how best to spend that money. We will target particularly challenging waiting lists. We will start with people who have been waiting the longest, which is the fairest way of doing it. We do not need to have a national treatment purchase fund, which is a convenient tool for keeping waiting lists low but ignores the fact that some people have been waiting a very long time. We will also examine specialties where there are particular limitations or challenges.

In the current year's Estimates, funding has been allocated for the HSE to develop the women and infants health programme, which comes under the national maternity strategy. I am very proud to say that we have a national maternity strategy. It somewhat boggles the mind that this is the first time we have had one. It is a very impressive document, and now we need to bring it to life. The women in health programme in the HSE will do that.

The UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities is a priority project for my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy McGrath. He is working extraordinarily hard across a number of Departments to deliver this. It involves health, justice and other areas of Government that need to be pulled together. The plan is to try to get this done by the end of the year, but I will ask the Minister of State to update Senator Dolan and the committee by way of letter on the current position.