David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has to understand what causes the problem with waiting lists. It is the same thing that causes the problem in our emergency departments. We do not have enough admission beds in hospitals. Two years ago, in budget 2021, the Minister committed to bring 1,147 additional in-patient acute beds into the system. Some 400 of those have not yet been delivered. Hospitals do not have the beds to admit patients in the numbers they need. That creates problems in our emergency departments. We do not have the enhanced community care that we were promised along with integrated care and step-down beds in communities. This causes late discharges as hospitals cannot discharge people into the community as they do not have the beds. That is a second problem. The third problem is GP capacity, which we will deal with later.

For the first time, we are beginning to see people waiting for access to a GP. Will we get to a point where we have waiting lists to see a GP? People are waiting not just days but sometimes weeks for appointments. These are the problems. When people are unable to access a GP in hours or out of hours they have no choice but to attend our emergency departments. When we have emergency departments overflowing it is a symptom of everything going wrong at the same time. The Minister should convene a meeting of the task force, get the stakeholders together and put all the options on the table, including leveraging capacity in the private sector, because this is so urgent.

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