David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On that note, in the last number of months I have visited 17 hospitals. I have met 17 hospital managers and all of their clinical teams. I have met the CEOs of hospital groups. I have also met people who work in primary and community care settings. While some good work has been done through the enhanced community care programme there is still an awful lot more to be done so that we can have admission avoidance in acute hospitals, which is one of the things that we need to do to reduce the cancellation of surgeries and hospital appointments because that is not sustainable. I will draft a report on all of my visits. I will do a synopsis of what I have been told and what I have learned from GPs. There is an issue in terms of GP access. We know that we need more GPs. There are problems in terms out-of-hours GP access for patients. For far too many people, such as people who suffer chronic pain, respiratory illnesses or other illnesses, care management in the community is not happening quickly enough. The infrastructure does not exist so the integrated care piece is critically important. If we get that right then we can reduce wait times and increase hospital avoidance, which is important.

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