Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I echo Deputy Durkan's comments about our healthcare workers. They have been the very best of us all over the past two years.

They have been extraordinary, but they are exhausted. Too much is being asked too often of our healthcare workers. I meet our healthcare workers all over the country. I met fantastic healthcare workers from Limerick just last week. They are all tired and need our help. I echo the acknowledgement of the extraordinary work our healthcare workers have done.

Regarding where we go from here, the first thing to say is that we are absolutely focused on and committed to the mission of achieving universal healthcare. It is what the entire programme for Government is framed around and what Sláintecare provides a path to. It is one of the most important projects yet to be finished in our country. We all know that hundreds of thousands of men and women are waiting for care. Just slightly shy of 100,000 children and adolescents are also waiting for care. That is simply not acceptable in our country.

To address the situation, we are mobilising the Department and the public health service, our partners outside the public health service and this budget in order to realise the mission of universal healthcare. In my opening remarks I addressed the three tests of universal healthcare: whether people can get care when they need it; whether consistently high-quality care is received when people do get it; and can people afford it. To that end, this budget has many affordability measures and we are going to introduce more next year. This is all part of a journey.

On the provision of high-quality care, it will have been seen that there has been significant investment in our clinical strategies and a new focus on women's healthcare. That is intended to seek to achieve consistently high-quality care and patient outcomes. The aspect which has dominated most of the debate around healthcare is access to services. In that regard, we are doing two things in parallel. Tomorrow, I will be launching the new waiting list plan for this year. It is an ambitious €350 million plan. In addition, we are adding more permanent capacity to the public health service than at any time on record. While we are doing that, we are doing it in the way set out in the Sláintecare policy. I refer to moving care into the community, increasing productivity, deploying new technologies and moving to a regional healthcare system. A combination of increased assets-----