Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact that up to 300,000 children may benefit from this change but, again, I have a concern that we may be putting the cart before the horse in not addressing the other issues and trying to repair the other cracks in our health service. I am aware, for instance, that an agreement with the Irish Medical Organisation on contractual reform, which was concluded last year, was supposed to increase investment in general practice by approximately 40% or €210 million by 2023. I would like to know exactly how much of that expected increase has been delivered. Are we still on track to have a €210 million increase by 2023? Has the figure of €210 million been revised downwards and, if so, by how much? This is vitally important because if those increases do not materialise we will be expecting GPs to deliver a rapidly increasing level of service with a rapidly decreasing level of funding. We need to know where we stand on that issue.

In my constituency of Laois-Offaly we have seen the out-of-hours Midoc service in Birr close down, which is a town with a growing population, because there were not enough GPs to service it. I ask the Minister again if we putting the cart before the horse in that respect.

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