Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are facing into a very difficult winter. In fairness, we are used to difficult winters in this State and to what comes with them - delays, trolleys and overstretched services - but this year is expected to be much worse due to Covid-19.

Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have developed and maintained a two-tier health system which has led to a poorly functioning public health service and a highly profitable, expensive private system. The health service in this State is dysfunctional at the best of times. Healthcare and hospital staff work hard and provide excellent healthcare but the State infrastructure is wholly inadequate to provide the health service we need in this State. In Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, there were 13,750 people on outpatient waiting lists at the end of June. Almost 3,000 of those have been waiting for longer than a year. More than 1,800 of them are waiting on paediatric or paediatric ear, nose and throat, ENT, appointments. These numbers are shocking. We need a plan to ensure people are not left languishing on waiting lists for years, sick, worried and suffering. This has long been the case but given the backlogs caused by Covid, the Government needs to take this seriously and address the shortcomings in our health service.

Covid should have taught the Government the importance of investing in public healthcare. If we had been functioning in a normal way before Covid, the damage would have been much less. Services would have been more robust and better able to cope with the enormous challenges brought by Covid-19.

The ambulance service is another casualty of short staffing and under-resourcing. On Sunday night, a nursing home in Drogheda called for an ambulance for a seriously ill 95 year-old woman. It took the ambulance three and a half hours to arrive. That is an extraordinary length of time for a seriously ill elderly woman to wait for urgent healthcare. I have since learned that there are currently two paramedics in Drogheda ambulance station on managerial leave. This means they spend their 12-hour shifts sitting in an office in the station and not working. They have been in this position since last July and they want to work. This week, I am told 14 shifts will need to be covered due to staff being on Covid-19 leave, managerial leave or leave for another reason. This echoes the national picture of understaffing in our ambulance service, and that is before we head into the depths of winter. If we do not have a robust contingency plan, we are facing into disaster this winter, with staff having to take time off for Covid-related reasons. Having other fully qualified staff on managerial leave for extended periods, where they are at work but not allowed to do any work, is compounding the problem. It is only a matter of time before patient care is compromised by delays due to understaffing.

These are the same problems we have had for decades in our health system. It does not seem to matter how well we do economically, healthcare in this State is always in crisis. As such, it is high time that the Minister and Government put aside their ideological obsession with helping and funding private healthcare and focus instead on public healthcare services. They are the services that have been fighting Covid and do most of the heavy lifting on the front line-----

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