Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The situation is not acceptable. As the Deputy quite rightly lays out, it is not acceptable for hospitals, for inpatients, for outpatients, for diagnostics, for adults and children or for community care. The €350 million was put into the budget for exactly this reason. Additional funding is not required at this point because a fund like this has never been created before, to the best of my knowledge. We have €350 million and I would love nothing more than for the system to have fully utilised the €350 million before the end of the year. I would be delighted to be coming back here and to then go back to the Cabinet to say that, actually, we can go further and we can get more people treated. It is a very significant amount of money, so let us see how we go on that.

I absolutely accept the Deputy’s challenge on community. We are not ignoring community and it would be wrong to do so. Part of what we are doing in the plan the Deputy will see tomorrow is that we are looking at diagnostics. The Deputy will be aware we have a very successful initiative regarding GP access to diagnostics. I will have to check the figure but it was something like 138,000 radiology scans last year and we have rolled that over into this year. That is one of the big things we are doing to increase community access to diagnostics and it is going down very well with general practice.

The Ministers of State, Deputies Butler and Rabbitte, have been pushing very hard on other lists and a lot of work has been done on the assessment of need list on disability and on the home care waiting list and the mental health waiting list. One of the big focuses this year is to hire a very large number of community-based health and social care professionals as well. I fully accept that challenge.