Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for attending and for their presentations and the work they are doing in delivering health services. On the development of healthcare in the community, I want to give an example of where it is not working. I have a case of a 79-year-old who was in hospital with Covid for three months. He lives on his own and has impaired vision. Six weeks after coming out of hospital, he still had not been visited by a public health nurse or anyone else from the HSE.

He ended up back in hospital with a kidney infection for a further four days. I am wondering about the connectivity out there in the community. Is it really happening especially with people who are discharged from hospital? This is not a rural area, this is in an urban area. How can something like that happen when we are supposed to have more people now working within the community?

I want to check the issue as regards working with GPs. The workload of GPs has increased dramatically in the past two years in particular. We are now rolling out the extension of the free GP service for under-7s. I am not clear whether there has been direct engagement with GPs on this extension. The big issue that GPs have is the lack of support in terms of having nurses employed. When one compares with the UK there is probably one nurse for every GP employed in a practice. We do not have the same ratio here. My understanding here is that in one GP practice with six GPs there are only moneys available for one nurse. Are we looking at expanding that? If we want to keep more and more people out of the hospital system we need to increase the level of services provided in the community.