Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I outlined in response to Deputy Calleary what the winter plan aims to do. There are two different issues here. The first is the ongoing pressure on emergency departments that we have seen through the summer and into the autumn, particularly in hospitals such as the university hospitals in Limerick and Cork. I am more than familiar with that. The answer there is increased resources and capacity over time, and the capital resources to go in to deliver that increased capacity are being delivered. What we are trying to do in the winter plan, which is being published today, is to anticipate increased pressure on top of what is a difficult situation for many staff to manage, to alleviate pressure, to keep people out of hospital, and to ensure that we can move people on from hospital care into community care, step-down facilities or back into their homes with home care packages. That is what the €26 million is about. They are two separate issues.

We continue to have serious political debate about how broader health reform needs to happen and how we can spend what are limited, but at the same time significant, increases in, resources. This year, we will spend €17.1 billion on health, which is €1 billion more than we spent last year. When planning for additional beds, one cannot simply plan for the cost of building and delivering those beds in terms of capital expenditure without factoring in the cost of staffing them as well. At present, we have increased recruitment across different elements of the HSE and we must have a management system that plans for increased beds but also for the cost of staffing them so that we do not have requests coming back from the HSE to Government for dramatic increases in expenditure at the end of the year that have not been budgeted for, as one cannot run a health system like that.

As the Deputy will be aware, we are committed to significantly increasing the number of available beds. Unlike healthcare policy under previous Governments when there was lots of money to spend, they were reducing bed capacity, we are now back to the bed capacity at the height of the last boom. We need to do much more. What we are focused on today is the additional interventions that we can make to alleviate pressure on hospitals with the extra pressure that comes through the winter months, which I detailed in response to Deputy Calleary earlier.

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