Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I agree with Dr. Sweeney that the primary care centres should be the big driver to reduce the reliance on hospitals. We have built 14 primary healthcare centres in the State and yet we did not put an X-ray facility into any of them. The mind boggles. When I asked the question, "Why not?", I was told that it was not part of the brief when they were doing the design. Yet, these primary care centres were flagged as the saviour of the hospitals.

Consider the primary care centre in my town of Tuam as a good example. It was opened in 2016. It is now 2023. They said they would put in the X-ray facilities and they would retrofit it but it is still not happened. Why? It is because the public private partnership contract they put in place ceded control of that building, and 14 other facilities like it, to a private company. Now we cannot put in the X-ray facility without the express permission of a private company. That is the way we have been doing things, and I believe people have never been accountable for this. It is something we need to do in order to make sure we learn from our mistakes and when going forward we do not make the same mistakes again.

I agree with the philosophy that we need to get people out into the communities and we need to get people into step-down facilities. That takes money. I agree with Dr. Sweeney about the planning but we need to have some sort of a change in the HSE in how it does its business from the top and, especially in the context of its estates, we have a huge investment to do to be able to say to people that they do not need private health insurance and that we can give everybody the same thing. It was said earlier that the best form of health service is full public or full private and that a hybrid of the two creates awful problems. I agree with that too.