Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I made a private visit to Tuam on my way home from a conference in Galway. It was an opportunity for me to pay my respects to the children who were buried there and to see the site for myself. It was not quite what I expected. I expected to see the grounds of an old abandoned institution. It is not that at all; it is a very small site, almost within a housing estate, beside a large playground. I only had about 30 minutes. I would have liked to meet with Catherine Corless, representatives of survivors, residents who have concerns and the local authority but in the period I had, about 30 or 40 minutes, it would not have been possible to do that or to do any of them justice. It was a case of either postponing my visit for a later point in a few months' time or taking the opportunity to stop by and pay my respects and see the place for myself, which I did. I have replied to Catherine Corless and I will meet her with the Minister, Deputy Zappone, because the Minister is the person who is dealing with this issue for the Government and who understands it in a depth that I do not. I will meet her in due course when we are ready to make a decision on the next steps.

The Cabinet sub-committee on health has not met to discuss the HSE budget overrun but it has been discussed at Cabinet. As Deputies will know from my previous replies to questions on this issue, I tend to discuss more things with the full Cabinet than in the past. In the past, bodies such as the Economic Management Council, EMC, or smaller groups were used to discuss important issues. I decided to do it differently and to include the entire Cabinet more and to be more collective in decision-making rather than using bodies such as the EMC which excluded Ministers from decision-making in the past. I am glad to have made some changes in that regard. It has been discussed with the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and the Minister for Health. We are trying to get an accurate fix on the likely overrun. We often talk in healthcare about how money should follow the patient and money should get to the patient. We are not in a very good position at all to follow the money in the health service due to the very outdated financial systems so we are trying to calculate what the likely overrun is going to be for this year. As things stand, notwithstanding the fact that health has a huge allocation of €16 billion, which is the biggest ever in the history of the State, health spending is running 9% ahead of what it was last year so that overrun could be quite substantial. It could be in the region of the figures people have seen in the newspapers and that certainly limits our room for manoeuvre when it comes to the budget in two weeks' time because much of that overrun will have to be accommodated in the base for next year as well. Much of it is happening for good reasons. Recruitment is happening apace. There are 1,000 more nurses working in our public health system than we had this time last year. There have been pay increases across the board for 115,000 healthcare staff. Our children's hospital is flying up. The urgent care centre in Blanchardstown is almost roof on at this stage. We have extended things such as free GP care to carers because they need to be cared for too. We are also seeing substantial reductions in the number of people waiting for operations and procedures in our hospitals. Whether it is hips, eyes, knees, cataracts, angiograms or skin lesions being removed, there are 10,000 fewer people waiting for an operation or procedure now than a year ago. The average person is waiting less than six months now for an operation or procedure. We want to get that down to three months over the period ahead.

In terms of medical cannabis, as I understand it, it is required that one has a prescription from a consultant and that one has a licence from the Minister for Health. That is an unusual situation and not one that is desirable or workable. I can guarantee the House that the Minister for Health, while he has signed all except one of the requests for a licence, does not want to be in a situation where he is doing that. It is not the role of a politician to be signing licences for individuals to have their medicines. That is why he is developing the cannabis access programme to do it better. I understand they are running into difficulties with sourcing. If this is a medicine, it needs to be treated like a medicine and we need to make sure it is at pharmaceutical and medicine grade. They are running into difficulties in sourcing it.

On Deputy Boyd Barrett's question, I am not in a position to talk about individual cases or patients in the House. I do not have access to patients' files or records. No politician does or should. There are issues of confidentiality and privacy involved in any individual case. What I can say more generally is that patients can be moved to what is called the suspended list. A patient who may be on a waiting list for surgery may become unfit for surgery for any number of reasons for a period.

They are put on a suspended waiting list but can then be put back on the active waiting list when they are fit for surgery again but I do not have the full information on individual cases and it would be wrong for me to comment on them. I am told, however, that the scoliosis figures for the end of January show there are 188 patients of which 109 are spinal fusion patients on the list for spinal surgery. Of the 90 actively waiting, 14 are to come in, which means they have a date for their surgery, 40 are suspended and 44 are on the planned procedural list with an indicative date for their procedure. The Minister for Health has prioritised the development of a sustainable solution for scoliosis and an additional €9 million has been provided to the HSE this year specifically to develop paediatric orthopaedic services including further increasing access to those services.

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