Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman for understanding my unavoidable delay.

On the Cork hospital issue, this is a local and regional issue but is also a national issue because it is a key part of the infrastructure which we need to get right. The population of Cork, as Senator Colm Burke outlined, has grown significantly but the health service has not grown in the region to meet its needs, most certainly from an acute hospital bed point of view. We have secured funding in the national development plan to develop to deliver a new acute hospital for Cork but also elective-only hospitals for Cork, Galway and Dublin. This will have a significant transformational effect on the delivery of scheduled care and improvements to our waiting lists. The director general of the HSE recently brought me to Scotland where we looked at how its elective-only model has transformed its waiting lists. This was part of the process for developing our elective-only models here.

Once we have finalised the capital plan with the HSE in the coming weeks, I will work with the Department to put a structure in place to advance the preparatory work that the Senator identified needs to be done. I hope by year end that we could have a clear outline as to what that preparatory work looks like, who will do it, as well as what responsibility lies with the Department in terms of policy formation and with the HSE and the hospital groups in terms of delivering it on the ground.

On the issue of the GP contract, we are not talking about this in an abstract concept. Negotiations are going on every week. There are GP contract negotiations taking place in my Department with the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO. Both sides have said publicly that they want these talks to conclude by the end of this year. I expect that they will. We have a sizeable sum of money to invest in general practice on a multi-annual basis, agreed with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, myself and the Taoiseach. This is a level of investment which will enable us to make general practice sustainable. General practice has rightly said that it has suffered cuts, FEMPI cuts and so forth, through successive Governments during the economic recession. We need to move beyond that and address it in terms of sustainability. Second, we must examine how general practitioners, if resourced to do so, can do more procedures which are currently done in hospital settings, specifically around the whole area of chronic disease management. Third, there is the whole area of access. The Oireachtas signed off on the Sláintecare plan, which wants to see many more people access GP care either for free or at low cost.

How can we do more to improve on access, chronic disease management and sustainability? I hear people misrepresent my position on this regularly, suggesting that my officials and I are only talking to general practitioners about doing more and giving them more resources to do more. People who make that argument intentionally ignore what I have just said, that a very important part of that conversation is about the sustainability of the existing services and the resources that are required to do fulfil the role. I expect those discussions to conclude by the end of the year. It is a very exciting piece of work and has taken far longer anybody than would have wanted, particularly far longer than GPs would have wanted. This significant piece of work is potentially transformational for the health service and is very much in line with Sláintecare and I look forward to it concluding.

I will ask Mr. Connaghan to deal with the staff recruitment measures. Senator Colm Burke and I engage on issues regularly enough at this committee, but I need to make this point. Sometimes when our discussions on managers and administrators are reported there is a suggestion that such staff bring no added value to the health service. Of course, that is not the case. Many of the questions, such as parliamentary questions, and the issues raised in Topical Issue and Commencement matter debates are about how we manage our outpatient clinic appointment. When we put more staff into outpatient clinics, they might be counted as administrative staff but they are very much helping to play a front-line role. We should do further work on explaining the value individuals who work very hard add to our health service. I will now pass over to Mr. Connaghan.