Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Forewarned is forearmed and we are trying to impress on the Minister of State the importance of ensuring all the mechanisms of the State are available to deal with this potential public health policy challenge, which could have a major impact on our health services and on the health of vulnerable people. Professor Sir Malcolm Grant of the NHS recently said that they were preparing for a catastrophic flu strain arriving in the UK that could have huge implications for the delivery of health care. If that is the case, we have to do the same. The national public health emergency team met in response to the CPE super bug and the same response is required to prepare for the eventuality of a flu virus reaching Ireland, which a vaccine will not necessarily prevent. We have to ask ourselves what we can do. We should consider opening additional intensive care beds. Isolation rooms will be critically important and community geriatricians and nurse specialists should be deployed in the community in order that elderly and vulnerable people who are primarily in the community care setting or nursing homes will not have to transferred into the acute hospital system through our emergency departments. They are overcrowded and we can predict that there will be huge overcrowding problems during the Christmas period and especially in the first few weeks of January when there will be massive cancellations of elective surgery and major surgery for cancer patients and others who have been waiting an extraordinary time for scheduled surgery. That will happen again because the Government does not seem to be capable of preparing for eventualities that will almost certainly happen. The combination of the flu virus and the super bug could overwhelm our health services.

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