Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. What I asked for from the HSE was an ambitious plan that would get these children the care they need as quickly as possible. I am not interested in solving it over a five-year period; we have got to solve it now. We have paediatric orthopaedic surgeons who do not have the operating theatre time they need. We have operating theatres that are open between 9 p.m. and 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, but not earlier or later and not on Saturdays or Sundays. There is much opportunity there. The HSE worked with Children's Health Ireland, CHI, and with Cappagh and have come back to me with a very ambitious plan. I will shortly be able to share the details. Will they achieve everything set out in the plan, even if it is fully-funded? They are going to try their very best but in a conversation I am having with their surgeons, they are saying that with healthcare, especially at the moment, it is very hard to give definitive guarantees on all of this. Emergency cases come in, theatres get used up, and maybe the neurosurgeons need the theatre that was meant to have a full list of paediatric orthopaedics that day. As such, there is a genuine nervousness and caution when CHI is giving me these figures. I would love all of us to recognise that what I am doing and what the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is doing is we are setting very ambitious targets and they are not always met by nature of the fact we are asking the system to go beyond what it has ever done before.

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