Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As I stand here, people have been waiting three and a half years in acute pain for an orthopaedic appointment and a whopping four and a half years for a respiratory appointment. That is a 54-month waiting list for respiratory appointments and we are about to face into a potential avalanche of respiratory cases as a result of long Covid. According to research by the Oireachtas Library & Research Service, which I commissioned, an estimated 114,500 people and rising in Ireland have long Covid. It is rapidly becoming a hidden iceberg of long-term chronic illness for our struggling health service. In December, analysis from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland showed that the shortfall in cancer diagnoses equates to a delayed diagnosis for invasive cancers of between seven and ten every day in 2020 alone. That is someone's mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, daughter or son. Last year, while still dealing with Covid, the HSE had to grapple with the cyberattack. On top of that, GP attendances are also down significantly due to a mixture of reasons, including cost, private patients unable to access any GP and those lucky enough to have a GP finding it difficult to get appointments. All these delays are leading to cancer being diagnosed at a later stage of the disease, when treatment options are limited and, tragically, the prognosis is poor. We urgently need to do things differently if we are to address these appalling waiting lists once and for all. There is no doubt that recruitment of staff is key but we have already seen from the Department of Health disclosure on Sunday, which was subsequently backed up by the HSE's chief executive, that we will be at least 4,500 staff short in the health service recruitment drive this year.

I accept that we cannot magically make staff appear but we could sponsor students in training today on the basis that they commit to working within the health service for a period after graduating.

Second, we need to look at the way the health system works now and how we can speed it up. For example, we could maximise the use of the existing health infrastructure by extending the operational hours so that we get more scans done on the same machine, including on Saturdays and Sundays, as well as using the spare diagnostic capacity within our smaller hospitals.

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