Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The public health system also requires much greater levels of management and the use of resources of taxpayers' money. This morning's count at 8 a.m. saw 300 patients waiting on trolleys, according to the report from TrolleyGAR, which does this every day. Last night at 8 p.m. some 152 patients were waiting on trolleys and at 8 a.m. yesterday morning, Tuesday, 10 November, 320 people were waiting on trolleys. As the Deputy knows, the number always declines during the course of the day.

The Minister for Health convened the emergency department task force in December last year to provide a real focus and momentum in dealing with the challenges presented by emergency department overcrowding, for which there are many reasons. Good progress was made in the implementation of this task force's recommendations. Delayed discharges have reduced steadily, from 830 last December to 567 on 3 November this year, which frees up approximately 265 beds to be used by acutely ill patients every day. The average number of patients waiting for greater than nine hours on trolleys in October was 115, down from 173 in February before that.

Waiting times for nursing home support scheme funding has reduced from 11 weeks to three to four weeks. As the Deputy will recall, we were told before that if we put money into this it would alleviate the problem. It has not done so despite a serious reduction in the waiting time. Transitional care funding has continued to support 3,000 approvals, which is very much above the original target of 500, some 1,200 additional home care packages will have been provided by the end of this year, and 173 additional nursing home beds and 65 short stay beds are now open. In addition to this, €117 million extra has provided in 2015 to help relieve pressure on acute hospitals.

I would be the first to say this is not the way I would like it to be, but clearly the request for resources, extra capacity and extra staff have all been met in part by the Minister, the Department and the HSE. In April this year, €74 million was allocated to reduce delayed discharges and lower the waiting times for the fair deal scheme as well as providing additional transitional beds, and €18 million has been allocated to support acute hospital systems over the winter by providing additional bed capacity to deal with these very problems. This additional funding has come on top of measures already taken when the Government provided the €5 million to deal with these acute hospitals. For the winter capacity, the hospital groups have all provided particular plans for each of the hospitals in the groups in respect of what they propose to do and how they propose to implement an integrated approach across primary, community, social and acute services to manage winter pressures, the scale of which we do not know yet because of what may occur with the weather and particular flus.

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