Dr. Colm Henry:

While it is the same crisis we face, we are not dealing with the same problem every year. If we look at our demographics, we had just over 400,000 people aged over 65 years in 2011 and now we have in excess of 700,000. At present, one in seven people is over 65 years of age, but by 2050, it will be one in four. In a sense, we are dealing with a moving target every winter and that target is us getting older as a population and depending more on healthcare services. This is why the solution cannot be, and this has been identified, whatever flaws there were in the acute hospital capacity review of 2018, us relying on building acute hospital beds alone.

We must build a health service attuned to the needs of a population that is getting older and is more reliant on healthcare services. Without doing that, we will just be building beds in the acute sector to catch up with population; a race we will never win.