Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister of State and the officials for their time today and for the statements made. I start with performance and accountability. In Ireland, we spend more on healthcare than almost any other country on earth. Budgets over the last number of years have been the highest in our history. Commensurately, the overruns have been the most extensive we have ever had. At the same time, we have more people waiting on trolleys than ever and while there have been improvements in some areas, the total number of men, women and children on waiting lists is higher than it has ever been. Children with special needs are waiting three years to get help, which deprives them of the future they could have. There are chronic waiting lists on multiple surgical lists and surgeries will have been cancelled across the country this morning because our hospitals are overcrowded. It is accepted that a safe and good level for hospitals is approximately 85% whereas ours are between 97% and 104%.

Certain specialties have particular problems. Children with scoliosis, for example, are waiting more than three years for operations in Crumlin and, as a result, are having their internal organs crushed by their rib cages as their spines curve to over 100%. Routine appointments for urology at St. James's involve waiting lists of over six years. As the Minister knows well, many of our mental health services have become so fractured that people are terrified of children and young persons being referred from early intervention to CAMHS where services basically do not exist. Government figures released in reply to a parliamentary question recently indicate that we have only one tenth of the staff we need in mental health. Diagnostics are being cut off for GPs. I had a letter this week from Navan Hospital to say that due to a shortage of radiographers, GPs can no longer refer for DEXA scanning. The list goes on and on.

In spite of the best efforts of many doctors, nurses and, I am sure, officials, and in spite of the spending of more money than ever before over many years in a row, many parts of the system are in crisis. There is a level of suffering and a lack of access that we have never seen before. Given all of that, my question goes to accountability. Has anyone lost his or her job at a political level, within the Department or anywhere across the HSE? Has anyone been fired for the catastrophic failures we are seeing across the system notwithstanding the vast amounts of money being spent?