Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I call on the Minister to reopen hospital beds. Those waiting on the trolleys are sick people who need to be in hospital. One reason they are on trolleys is there are no hospital inpatient beds available to them. All acute hospital beds need to be reopened immediately and appropriately staffed and resourced. Health care professionals in emergency departments and acute hospitals nationwide have been telling us this for years, as has the annual crisis. I disagree with the Minister. I do not think we need a bed capacity review to tell us what is already obvious. What we need is more hospital beds.

Health care is a continuum. The overcrowding and backlog we are seeing in the emergency departments at present are the result of problems throughout the entirety of the health care system, which are made visible when the system is at crisis point. The flow of patients from emergency departments through the hospitals and safely home again needs to be facilitated. We need not only more beds but also more rehabilitation and support services for patients in hospital, in the transition period from hospital back to their homes, and into the community. We need more nursing and medical staff, undoubtedly. However, we also need more health care professionals, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, social care workers, dieticians and psychologists.

Adequate home care packages need to be provided if people are to return home from hospital and recover fully. Placing people on a waiting list for home care packages and discharging them without any support while they wait for this service is totally unacceptable. Galway is a very good example if the Minister wants to check this. We should also consider working with the non-profit organisations. The Parkinson's Association of Ireland's branch in Galway caters for over 700 members. Unfortunately, before Christmas, funding fell short and three of its members had to attend an accident and emergency department. Prior to that, in its five years of existence it has never had to use an accident and emergency department.

See this speech in context