Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Completely unacceptable on both counts. It is unacceptable that anyone would be waiting more than 24 hours on a trolley for admission to a hospital. It is even more unacceptable that people over 75 would be waiting. It is being addressed but it is not acceptable that it is the case. A huge amount of extra resources were put in place, and what we have seen, in particular since about the second week in January, is a lot of delayed or deferred care and many people coming in. I met with the HSE several times on this issue and asked why this is happening given the huge extra resources we put in place in terms of prevention, emergency department, acute capacity and discharge. There are various Covid-related reasons the HSE points to, of which we are all aware, but one of the things it said is the number of people over 75 coming in has gone up a great deal. What is more, when they are admitted, the average length of stay for them is much longer.

In regard to those waiting for inpatient or outpatient care, there are more than 700,000 on the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, lists. As the Deputy said, a good proportion of that number is over 75. We are not specifically targeting people based on age, to be clear. We are targeting people based on clinical need. Some of this will come down to individual consultants looking at their patient lists and, on the basis they now have extra outpatient facilities, the hospital has extra outpatient facilities or there are extra operating theatre lists, saying which people are the highest priority. One thing we must do is, regardless of a person's age, whether he or she is eight or 80, we must ensure those waiting the longest get some form of priority. People are waiting years in our country. In one of the richest and most developed countries in the world, to have people waiting years is not acceptable. That is what tomorrow's plan is all about. It is to start a full-scale assault on those waiting lists and bring them down.