Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I pay my deepest sympathies to the families who have lost loved ones in this global pandemic. The efforts of our health workers have been truly inspirational, yet we heard this morning on "Today with Sean O'Rourke" that the Labour Court deal for nurses is behind schedule. I hope the Minister is dealing with that because as we know, these have the inspirational men and women at the forefront of this pandemic. I thank our doctors, nurses, paramedics and home support workers, as well as everyone on the front line, who have been to the forefront of this. We have been blessed in Cavan-Monaghan to have Cavan General Hospital and Monaghan General Hospital as the backbone during this pandemic. Unfortunately we have seen week-on-week increases and Cavan, as of Wednesday of this week, had 634 cases with 388 cases in Monaghan. Cavan has one of the highest rates in the country.

I want to raise two particular issues today. I am conscious that I have little time. One is home testing. There are incidents where referrals from home testing are being lost in translation. There is an elderly couple in my area. The husband was taken to hospital and subsequently died. He tested positive for Covid-19. His wife was at home, living alone for three weeks, waiting for a test. A referral for a home test had been made. Her daughter was living in the Minister's constituency and her son is somewhere else in the country. Eventually her daughter had to come and put herself, her mother and her family at risk, taking her to her own home in Kildare. She was tested within three hours of that transfer to a different community healthcare organisation, CHO, being made. I think that home referrals are a problem in CHO 1.

There is an issue with cancer patients. I am thinking of one particular gentleman, a young man with a wife and four small kids, who is waiting for an operation on a tumour in St. James's Hospital. He has been given no clarity as to when that operation might happen. Are operations that were scheduled before this pandemic happened still scheduled? What are the implications?

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