David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to finish on this point and go on to the other issues. The committee should absolutely engage with the author of the report and have discussions about how those recommendations were arrived that, and can form opinions but, ultimately, the Government, or whatever Government is in place, has to make decisions on the implementation of the recommendations. Whatever legislative change comes will not come from this committee. It will ultimately come from the Minister and a Government decision. We can advise, and give observations. I would like to make that distinction. It is a political call that now has to be made, and we all have a responsibility to engage. I will, and I support many of the recommendations from what I have seen in the report. However, we will have that engagement.

I would like to move on to the overcrowding in hospitals. The Minister mentioned the waiting lists, and there has been some reduction in recent times. However, the reduction is quite small compared to the growth of the waiting list that he outlined, quite rightly, since 2015. The National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, publishes waiting lists for acute hospitals. It does not publish all waiting lists, by the way. It does not publish diagnostic waiting times or community waiting times. However, regarding acute hospital numbers, in January 2020 it was 776,000. In March 2023, it was 885,000, which is still a significant increase. Then there are the numbers of people on hospital trolleys. Yesterday, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, IMNO, there were 592 people on hospital trolleys. Trolley numbers are averaging 560 patients a day, every day this month. It is almost the new normal, that we have arrived at a point where more than 500 seems to be normal. However, we can never accept it as anywhere near normal. Then there is the average wait time for admission to a bed in hospitals. In February 2019, it was ten and a half hours; in February of this year, it was 11.4 hours. All of those metrics are going in the wrong direction, including the time people are waiting in emergency departments and the number of people on hospital trolleys. The number of people who are waiting has come down slightly in terms of long waits, but it is still exceptionally high.

Does the Minister accept he has a long way to go before he gets anywhere near meeting the Sláintecare targets?