Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to acknowledge the huge efforts that every individual and every family in every community are making. The daily growth rate is coming down and yesterday was 18%. However, at even 15% we will still be tracking the number of confirmed cases in Italy, so more will have to be done. Today's legislation will help but all of us - every family and every individual - will have to work together to bring this daily growth rate down, and do so very quickly.

I want to acknowledge the extraordinary work and dedication of our healthcare professionals - our doctors, nurses and the wide range of other professionals in our system. They are putting themselves at risk, they are working night and day and they are not seeing their families. They are getting us ready for a surge that will come and trying to run an entire healthcare system at the same time.

I want to bring up the issue of personal protective equipment, PPE. One in four confirmed cases are now healthcare workers, as we know. Hospitals are now missing hundreds of doctors and nurses. I spoke to one clinical director this morning and in his hospital, he is missing several hundred clinicians. They are very worried. I have reports from around the country that the required care for non-Covid-19 and Covid-19 patients is not happening as it should. An example from yesterday involved three Covid-19 patients in a ward, where the nurses had sufficient masks to pick just one of them to go in and help. Obviously, that is not a situation we can stand over. We all hope this aeroplane lands with PPE this Sunday. However, clinicians are being told they will not have those supplies until Tuesday. Every effort needs to be made to make sure that gear is unloaded, packaged and sent in vans and trucks immediately so our clinicians, starting with hospitals and intensive care units, have that PPE within hours of it landing. That has to happen.

The provisions for healthcare in this Bill are welcome but they do not go far enough. The Minister referenced that we must have sufficient checks and balances in place for healthcare workers qualified abroad. I would argue that any nurse who has spent ten years working in the NHS and who wants to help us now should be allowed back in, and burying them in red tape is not something we should be doing right now. We want to see more happen. Critically, we need detail on the student nurse payments, which need to happen, but we have no detail. Similarly, we need detail on consultants. We are essentially treating the entire hospital system as a public health system, and that is the right thing to do. However, the consultants need a contract in place whereby everybody is treated the same, so they can get on and do the job we need them to do.

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