Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The programme for Government provides that continued investment of €50 million per year will be made available to reduce waiting lists and overcrowding, particularly for urgent cases and for those who have been waiting longest. Yet over 660,000 people are currently on waiting lists. Alarmingly, this represents a steady increase of approximately 30,000 since last February. Behind all these figures are human beings and the Minister of State knows as well as I do that many people in west Cork are now on waiting lists for long periods and this really has to addressed. Aside from the distress these long and protracted waiting lists have on patients and the impact it has on their medical conditions, there is also the knock-on effect that waiting lists and overcrowding have on day-to-day treatments and procedures, particularly if emergency departments are only dealing with overcrowding and emergency situations. There is no doubt that making more facilities available at primary care level will help to alleviate the pressure experienced in hospital waiting rooms and emergency departments. However, it also needs to be noted that extra resources afforded to general hospitals would certainly ease the burden on the larger university hospitals. I know the Minister of State is working on it and that progress is slowly being made on a rehabilitation unit and endoscopy unit for Bantry General Hospital in our constituency of Cork South-West. Should these facilities be in place, there would be no need for patients to present at the various Cork city hospitals for such treatments. Efforts to address waiting lists and overcrowding should be all-encompassing and inefficiencies in the health system will prove to be counterproductive in the long run.

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