Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Brassil for his question and work on the Sláintecare strategy where it clearly came to the fore that funding community care and making that decisive shift is absolutely key. I want to assure him that we remain fully committed to the development of primary care. It is recognised that countries with a strong primary care sector have demonstrably better outcomes, lower mortality rates and lower overall health care costs.

As we have seen in recent years, there has been a significant investment in primary care centres around the country and 127 are now open. I want to be clear. They are not busy enough in terms of the volume we could be doing to provide services through primary care. That is not a criticism of the staff, who are excellent. We need to resource them to do more. That is why I am very pleased that in the budget announced this week we have received multiannual funding for 2020 and 2021 to hire 1,000 additional front-line staff to work in primary and community care. That means more public health nurses, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, occupational therapists and the sort of people one would expect to be part of a community team. This will properly staff our network.

In line with Sláintecare, a rough estimate shows that about 4,000 additional staff are needed to work within the community if we are to make the Sláintecare vision a reality. This will enable us to deliver 1,000 additional posts, a quarter of what we actually need. We are committed to delivering the 4,000 additional staff over ten years. To be very clear, I have spoken to the CEO of the HSE about funding and there will be funding to hire staff for the 1,000 posts by the end of this year because of the commitment given by the Minister for Finance, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, on the floor of Dáil Éireann in his budget day speech. In the budget day book atthere is reference to a €60 million full year cost for those staff. Any misinformation or confusion about that need not exist.

As Deputies know, given that I have been questioned about this very regularly, we have also reached a new agreement with our GPs. The agreement sees a decisive shift, in that from January people will be treated in GP clinics, rather than hospitals, for conditions such as asthma, heart failure and other chronic diseases. I want to do more with pharmacists and I may have an opportunity to talk about that at a future date.

See this speech in context