Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If we introduce tax cuts and reduce the USC in this upcoming budget, we will fail to deliver on legacy service deficits. I am referring to the health service, in particular. The economy is growing, yet our health service is deteriorating. How can that be? The lack of capacity in our hospitals and staffing and infrastructural deficits are now leading to institutional bottlenecks in our emergency departments, as demonstrated by lengthening trolley queues, affecting several hundred patients every day, and the now-predictable seasonal peaks in trolley queues. Waiting lists for essential planned care are now also institutionalised and are worsening week on week. Waiting times for specialist opinions and diagnostic and screening procedures result in a failure to provide patients with a service in a timely fashion. Transitional funding to stimulate health reform is not obvious in any statement from the Government.

These deficits in our health service have now reached such proportions as to be an abuse of our patients and an infringement of their right to a proper functioning health service. I urge the Government to commit to a root-and-branch reform programme of our health service. I do not believe giving piecemeal funding to our fragmented health service is the best way to proceed. What is needed is to develop a new governance framework for our health service in which efficiency and accountability are paramount. This requires political buy-in and the Government to commit publicly to a health reform programme. It requires legislative change, which demands accountability, answerability, efficiency and the taking of responsibility for good governance in our health service. I refer to both managerial and clinical governance.

Integration of services underpinned by a reform programme will bring savings and, most particularly, better outcomes for patients, which, after all, is what the health service seeks to achieve. I see no evidence is this summer economic statement that indicates that a health service reform funding programme will be instituted. The Sláintecare reform programme gives a blueprint for essential health service reform and requires an urgent commitment from this Government.

To give an example, I recently met a surgeon who was appointed. She has no beds, theatre space or staff. She has come back to Ireland to commit to the health service, yet she is not given the infrastructure to carry out her job. She is literally twiddling her thumbs.

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