Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to speak on this motion, which is obviously far from perfect. Since we came into government in 2011, we have been working very hard to make effective and long-term changes in the health system. As Deputy Heydon has mentioned, the system was absolutely far from perfect, to be quite honest, when Fianna Fáil left office after 14 years in which it had buckets of money to throw at the health service. I do not know how to describe the Private Members' motion that is before the House. All we see from Fianna Fáil again is a call for more beds and more staff. It is as if the country had buckets of money to throw at the health service, and as if that would fix the problems we currently have. This shows that Fianna Fáil has learned absolutely nothing from the last seven years. It has gone right back into the cycle of what it was doing for the previous 14 years. There is no evidence that Fianna Fáil demonstrated any intent to reform the health service during its time in government. The difference is that the delivery of top-quality health care in Ireland is central to everything we do and to the decisions we make.

Nobody - not the Minister and not any member of the Government parties - thinks it is acceptable that 338 patients were waiting on trolleys in our emergency departments this morning. We have to look at what the future will be like as a result of the reforms made by this Government. We will continue to make such reforms. Emergency departments will see a reduction of one third in the number of patients on trolleys. There will be a reduction in delayed discharges. We will see easier access to urgent care, improvements in chronic disease management and timely assessments, treatments, admissions and discharges. In particular, there will be a reduction in the length of hospital stats. The list goes on. Among the real broad, standing, durable, long-term reforms that can be accredited to this Government is that we have brought 46 primary care centres to towns and cities right across the country. We are committed to opening at least one each month from this point forward. We are expanding the range of services that are available in those centres. We have created hospital groups with a view to reorganising and managing the very limited resources we have. This will ensure we get efficiency for the money we are spending. The approach we have taken in the form of a wellness model, which involves a holistic approach to health care and preventative care, will result in a smaller number of people needing to use our acute and emergency services in the first place.

I would like to conclude by speaking about acute services, which are the subject of a great deal of media and political attention. Although the focus on trolley watch and on waiting lists is warranted, I emphasise that supporting community services will help to alleviate some of the problems in acute services that we are seeing today. I particularly feel that we need to provide clerical and administrative staff to public health nurses, who provide a vital service in our communities. Our nurses should be able to concentrate on assessing and supporting clients in their homes until that process has been completed. They should be helping to prevent admissions to the acute services, where their clients often end up languishing in beds because there is nowhere for them to move on to. This causes the cycle I have outlined to continue. Public health nurses can sometimes be swamped with clerical work. They maintain that up to 50% of their time is spent doing paperwork. I think that is something that needs to be addressed and I would like to see it addressed in the future. Tonight's motion, as proposed by Fianna Fáil, demonstrates the short-term populist solutions that we have always seen from the big spenders in that party.

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