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

One of the issues that keeps coming up in the context of health is that of oral care. Again,.there are shortages and blockages within the system. Mr. Watt outlined the number of staff who have been recruited and so on. Is this one of the areas that is being prioritised? People are encountering difficulty getting an appointment with a dentist. There was reference earlier to the difficulty of getting an appointment with a GP. I ask the witnesses to address the issue of oral care and the importance of that.

Similarly, people are encountering difficulties with ophthalmology. There were buses travelling to the North and so on. Again, there are blockages within the system.

The challenge we face as a committee is that we are getting figures from Mr. Watt that are positive regarding the recruitment of additional staff and so on but we are not getting a sense of the gaps within the service. I will give an example. We got a positive message about the number of diagnostic scans but we do not know how many people are waiting on scans. There may be people at home watching this meeting who have been waiting 12 months or two years or whatever it is. There are also the people who go down the private route to try to get a scan and so on. There are a lot of gaps but we are not really getting the sense of that in the picture we are getting. In the context of recruitment, we have heard about the 2,700 people, with 1,100 nurses and midwives. We are getting a sense of from where those staff are coming but there is a gap in the context of other services. That was touched on in the context of speech and language therapy. That issue is raised with all members, as public representatives. One of the challenges in my area, for example, is that a person recruited to work there will be going into an area where there are potentially thousands of people on the waiting list and the system is clearly missing key personnel, with the result that the list is getting ever longer. We are not getting a sense of issues such as that from the meeting. Where the HSE or the Department have teams in place that are working, that is great, but what about the teams that are clearly broken or that have key personnel missing? Is there a different way of doing this type of meeting in future? I am just throwing that out to the witnesses.