Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The commitment of the Government to manage and get us through this health crisis is clear in the additional €2.5 billion spent so far. That will not be the end of it this year or next year. There will have to be major multibillion additional spending so that we can cope. To date, we have coped. It has been difficult and has involved serious stress on front-line workers and everyone else in the country as we have tried to suppress the virus and avoid going beyond the capacity of our health system. However, we have managed that to date. That is why in recent weeks the Government had to make a tough call by raising the level of restrictions in Dublin. Although the numbers are low, they are rising. That forced us to make that call.

That is the primary issue in terms of managing through this winter period. I believe we can manage it. We have 11,000 beds in the system. Even though the numbers are rising, the number of Covid-19 beds is still relatively small. If we can see in Dublin and other parts of the country the same success that we saw in counties Kildare, Offaly and elsewhere in terms of stopping the increase in its tracks, we will manage our way through it. Part of that involves €600 million on top of the €2.5 billion spending already committed this year. This additional spending is to ensure we get through this critical winter period. My understanding is that this will provide a further 900 acute beds and 50 critical care beds. I am confident that the system, as it has shown in the past six months, will be able to be flexible and adapt as needs be, depending on what numbers are required in the bed capacity. The approach will include measures such as bringing private hospitals into the system, as needs be and if we need to do so, which we also did earlier this year.

Critical to managing this will be maintaining the strategic direction of change that was agreed by the previous Dáil and committed to by this Government, namely, the development of Sláintecare. The critical point in our system, as we all know, is in the emergency wards and rooms in our hospitals. We should use what happened during Covid-19, that is, the emergence of the ability to use online and other systems and other new efficient ways of working, to take out some of those pinch-point bottlenecks. That will be the key measure. The HSE and the hospital system, in managing Covid-19, have shown exactly the flexibility we need to be able to manage our winter programme.

I will have to come back to Deputy Kelly with specifics on how exactly we will roll out the flu vaccine.

That is a technical issue and I will have to come back to the Deputy with the mechanism for doing it. The key to it is this broader strategic approach to how we address Covid, implement Sláintecare and use the flexibility that has come in the Covid period to manage the winter period with these additional resources. I am confident that we can and will do that.

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