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

I am very much aware that our emergency departments are very overcrowded today. Indeed, they have been for quite some time. However, there has been a reduction in overcrowding today versus yesterday and we expect that reduction to continue through to tomorrow and Friday. As regards the actions the Government is taking, we are adding more beds to the hospital system. Since 2014, as soon as we had the money to do so, we started adding new beds to the system. That will continue. New bed blocks are under construction in Clonmel and Limerick and we will have them open as soon as possible.

We are also providing more funding for the fair deal and home care. The budget for the fair deal will exceed €1 billion for the first time next year. That will enable us to reduce the number of delayed discharges, where patients are in hospital and do not need to be there and could go to a nursing home or go home. We must ensure that happens much faster than it does currently. We are also investing in community care. We have secured a deal with general practitioners, GPs, to improve the level and depth of services they provide in the community, to ensure that fewer people go into hospitals in the first place. Much action is being taken to deal with this problem.

To answer the Deputy's questions, the winter plan will be published next week. In many ways it does not need to be published: what is in it is what has been in it in previous winters, which is funding for the fair deal and home care and to open any beds that are closed, although I understand that none is closed currently, and investment in transition care. That is already happening even though the plan has not been published.

There is no recruitment moratorium. As I explained yesterday, the number of staff in the health service has been increasing for many years now. There are approximately 15,000 more people working in the public health service now than there were three years ago. There are 600 more nurses than this time last year and more than 100 more doctors. However, it is the case that Health Service Executive, HSE, managers are not allowed to hire staff if they do not have the money to pay for them. We had a recurring problem in previous years of HSE managers taking on staff for whom they did not have the budget. That is not allowed in education, the Civil Service or the Garda. It was an anomaly that the practice was allowed in the health service.

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