Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will declare an interest, in that I have been on a trolley within the past 12 months. Attending the hospital probably saved my life. My brother-in-law has also been on a trolley in the past week.

Some 4,000 patients were on accident and emergency department hospital trolleys or chairs during December. In the Dublin area alone, 1,318 patients were on trolleys. Last year in Tallaght hospital in my constituency, the news that a 91 year old patient was left on a trolley for 29 hours made headlines. That awful scenario was unacceptable to everyone, but the Taoiseach had the brass neck to blame hospital staff for the accident and emergency crisis. He conveniently ignored his and the preceding Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government's cuts of billions of euro in health funding, the removal of thousands beds from the hospital system, the shortage of key staff, the lack of step-down facilities and the failure to roll out primary care facilities. By way of example of that last point, some of the primary care services allocated to my area ended up in the constituency of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Reilly. Waiting lists for life-changing operations have also lengthened nationally. It seems to be much easier for Government politicians to blame hard-working hospital staff or seriously ill patients for getting sick instead of blaming the broken health system that the Government has created.

What is happening in the health service is a direct manifestation of a continuity of cuts. According to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation's trolley and ward watch analysis, the number of patients on trolleys has increased 40% between 2012 and 2015. I accept the Minister for Health's contention that the crisis cannot be solved overnight, but his party has been in power for five years and a strike this week by nurses who were at the end of their tether because of understaffing and overcrowding was narrowly averted at the 11th hour. This Fine Gael-Labour Party Government has had five years in power while patients and their families have had to do their time suffering hardship on trolleys and queuing on long waiting lists only to be told that elective surgeries are cancelled because of a lack or beds of key staff.

According to The Sunday Times, the HSE appointed 55 additional general managers last year following the lifting of a ban on recruitment and promotion in the public sector. The HSE now has 268 general managers earning up to €80,000 per year each, a 26% increase on the 213 at the start of 2015. Is this the long-awaited reform we have been promised? The Government is approaching the health care crisis by continuing to bloat middle management levels and pushing front-line staff to breaking point.

The accident and emergency crisis is made worse by the lack of home care support, physio support and lengthy elective surgery waiting lists, yet the minutes of the HSE directorate meeting of 26 November, which I read last night, state that the HSE is aiming to make €20 million in cuts to social care home support and transitional care costs in 2016 to make up for the loss in revenue.

It is time to end the chaos brought about by this Government. Universal health care, not universal health insurance, is part of the solution. Sinn Féin's Better For Health policy paper shows how we would begin to address this problem in government. The costed policy document outlines how we would increase the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population, ensure adequate registered nurse or doctor-to-patient ratios and sufficient beds, roll out sustained investment in community services that allows for either appropriate care without hospital admission or discharge to appropriate care settings or both, increase nursing home bed numbers, increase home help hours and home care packages and establish an emergency department task force on a permanent basis. However, the Government has firmly closed its eyes and ears to the problem and is hell bent on privatising our health services. Many of us in the community will fight that tooth and nail. This is personal for many people.

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