Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Clearly there is some movement as a result of the crisis that arose last week but there are, as stated by the Minister, 357 people still on trolleys today. As I mentioned, yesterday there were 431 people on trolleys, some of them in wards, resulting in there being more people in wards than there should be. I note from the RTE headlines this morning reference to the fact that 4,000 nurses have resigned in the past three years, 5,000 in total have resigned over the past number of years and warning that 1,000 more are to leave in the next year. Also, some 5,000 beds in total have been taken out of the system and 2,000 beds are currently closed.

It appears that the measures being taken are small in comparison with the scale of the problem, which gives little confidence that we are not going to continue to lurch from one crisis to another. As acknowledged by the Minister in his responses last week, the emergency measures being taken will lead to the cancellation of non-emergency surgery, which will affect waiting lists and result in other people in the health service suffering. Despite the emergency efforts to deal with the trolley crisis the situation is still out of control. Is it not time that the Minister listened to the nurses, who have now been forced to call for industrial action in the form of a work to rule early next month, that what is needed if we are to get a handle on this crisis is thousands more beds and thousands more nurses, significant extra resources and a reversal of the cuts that have been implemented?

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