Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and the officials from the Department and the HSE.

I fully appreciate the quality of the service provided throughout the health services at all levels and the degree to which staff are dedicated to their role. I worry about the deployment of personnel, an issue I have raised on many occasions in the past.

To what extent does the deployment of staff, resources and equipment within the health services in general and in public hospitals have an impact on the delivery of services? Second, the structures for the delivery of services are wrong. I have also raised this issue on numerous occasions. This has not been addressed and I hope it will be. For example, if there are 20,000 on the waiting lists, what do we do about it? Do we start by doing a calculation of how long it will take to clear the waiting list? How many more people will have joined the waiting list in the intervening period? Do we decide on a strategy to clear the 20,000 independently of whatever else is happening and deal with the cohort of patients as they arrive on the scene? I have said many times previously that there is no need for waiting listing at all, other than minimum waiting lists. There is no basis for having a two, three, four, five or six-month waiting list. We rely on the long list and how it will take to deal with it. One can do a calculation at any time and say it will take five years before that patient will be dealt with or six years, depending on the emergency cases that come through in the meantime. That is the problem. Has an audit been done to identify the deficiencies in the system that slow down the throughflow of patients? I know the answer because I received a reply to a parliamentary question yesterday as promised. There were 102,000 staff employed in the HSE, and that has increased to 135,000.