Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is talking about some of the issues with Sláintecare, such as the waiting lists. We are talking about 900,000 people on a waiting list. Part of the difficulty in dealing with that will be that Minister will have to buy in private elements. Sláintecare was supposed to be moving towards a one-tier rather than a two-tier system. The difficulty is that most people who are looking for medical supports or to get into the system see that if they try to get an MRI, for instance, there is a long waiting list. Their only other option, then, is to go the private route for their MRI. We are still at that level.

We will be bringing in BreastCheck shortly given the month that is in it and so on. At one time, if a woman had her breast removed, she could have reconstructive surgery within six months. Now there is a waiting list of two years. The delays are occurring right across the health service. A lot of that is down to Covid-19 and I accept all that.

The implementation committee said it had to resign because of resistance and so on. People are not seeing the roll-out of services.

The Minister said that Ireland is a laggard in relation to the ehealth and that we have old and antiquated systems. Is there any movement on the individual health identifiers, IHI? I imagine that should be standard practice across the service, if we are talking about tackling lists. It is all the more challenging if we have multiple people on them. How many of the individual systems are still running on the operating system, OS, which is out of support and is vulnerable to cyberattack? The Minister might come back to the committee another day in relation to that, as part of this report.

The biggest challenge we face are waiting lists which are getting longer. The Minister started off this morning by saying that he is being ambitious, and he mentioned the increase in number of ICU beds. Yet, a report from the HSE, going back to 2009, talked about a goal of 579 ICU beds. There are currently only 321 beds. We were talking about that years ago. Covid-19 has shown the weaknesses in our system. Clearly, one of those weaknesses is the number of ICU beds. The additional numbers of beds are, of course, welcome.

While I will not speak on the behalf of other members of the committee, we are all concerned about why there have been so many resignations from the high-level advisory committee, because the members feel as though there is a resistance to change. I do not get a sense from the questions that were posed to the Minister this morning, or from the answers that we received, that we are any nearer to finding out who those resistors are, what they are resisting, and what is the reason for the pushback.

I wish the Minister well with his new implementation committee. Will he use those people who have that experience as part of the new advisory committee moving forward?