Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I was agreeing the service plan in the context of the budget and the financial position for this year. Every effort was made to minimise any impact on services to patients and to maximise the cuts in the procurement of legal services, telecommunications and all services procured by the HSE, including fees on the drugs bill. A huge proportion of the cutbacks will come from that source in addition to the redundancy package, which will bring savings of between €50 million and €70 million because the take-up was not as anticipated. Every effort was made concerning all the services procured by the HSE, which is the biggest procurer in the country. All of those companies were spoken to with a view to reducing substantially the cost of providing those services to the public health system so that we can maintain services to patients.

It is wrong to say that things are getting worse. By every yardstick - whether it is infection control, life expectancy, infant mortality, cancer treatment, the performance of hospitals in terms of their volume of activity - there has been huge progress. It may surprise the House to know that we get a high volume of correspondence and if any of the Deputies opposite succeed me, I will leave the file for them to see. That correspondence is from patients and their families saying how wonderful the service is and how much it has improved from their previous experience. I know there are people who work in the health service who love to run it down. The health service is quite unique in that respect, but I get fantastic feedback from the vast majority of those who work in it - whether they are consultants, junior hospital doctors or nurses - about the improvements taking place.

Sometimes, as changes happen, it is not as evident to those of us who are not in daily contact with that work. That is not to say that people are not working under enormous pressure, that there are not huge challenges, deficits and difficulties - of course there are. It would be a sad reflection on all of us, however, given the huge investment of public resources that has gone into the public health service, and the commitment to change that has occurred in recent years, if we were not seeing substantial improvements, year in and year out, across virtually all headings.

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