Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for bringing forward this legislation. I very much welcome it. I will reply to a comment made earlier which compared the Irish healthcare service to the Third World. It is totally inappropriate. I say this as someone who has visited a number of countries in the Third World. Life expectancy in this country is one of the highest in Europe. To compare our healthcare service to the Third World is totally inappropriate. It is also a criticism of the people working in our healthcare sector.

Staff in our healthcare sector has increased by 35,000 people. Since December 2014, it has gone up from 103,000 to more than 135,000 whole-time equivalents. We are really talking about 150,000 to 155,000 people working in the sector. There has been a substantial increase. Yes, there are challenges in many areas, which will continue to be there and to be dealt with in the best way possible. It is important that correction is made.

I welcome the Minister's proposal on the removal of the inpatient charters for children under 16. It is very welcome. I very much welcome the fact we are also talking about a scheme to increase the age limit for medical cards which will bring in an extra 80,000 children. With regard to the proposed introduction of pre-contraception, I raised this as a Topical Issue matter last Thursday week, and I flagged concerns on a number of issues. The first was on whether there was a need for legislative regulation. The reply was not as informative as the Minister has been today. The issue of legislation is now clarified, which is one of the issues on which I was looking for clarification last Thursday week.

The second issue about which I was concerned was the agreement with the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO. We need to get some clarification on that, because it is very important we have all parties on board with regard to dealing with and delivering this scheme. I was looking at a survey done on people in the healthcare sector. Some 41% of those interviewed were worried about cost recovery being in place with regard to the service provided. A concern was also raised about long-acting reversible contraception, LARC, in terms of whether we have sufficient training available for GPs. The other issue with the roll-out of this scheme is the geographical spread. Has enough work been done on that issue to make sure all areas of the country have access to the scheme? It is very important.

The third issue was the information campaign. We need to get clarification about the roll-out of an information campaign and, in particular, the issue with third level colleges. It was for that reason I tabled that Topical Issue matter last Thursday week. We are talking about having this up and running by the end of August. I am not sure whether we are dealing or have dealt adequately over recent years with the importance of our third level institutions and making sure we have adequate medical support for people who attend our third level colleges. However, I welcome that we are now covered by way of legislation. I know it is an amendment to this Bill. It is extremely important we make sure all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed with the introduction of the scheme and that it is available in the time planned, which is August of this year.

I will move on to the issue of new drugs. The former Belgian health minister did a short presentation at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health recently on the issue of the group of countries in the Benelux agreement. Despite the fact that six countries are involved in the Benelux agreement, there is still a problem with regard to the timescale. We were given information to the extent that it is taking approximately 212 days for a new drug to be made available in Denmark, whereas it is taking 440 days in Belgium and 477 days in Ireland. That is an average timeframe. It is great we are now putting more funding into this area and that is very welcome, but it is very hard to explain the timescale to a parent of a child who needs a particular drug and cannot access it when it is available in another country in the European Union and even one that is part of the Benelux agreement.

I was on the committee on health back in 2018 when it did a report on this. We made substantial proposals about how to expedite the issue of availability. It is interesting that when the European Medicines Agency approved a drug for Covid, it was suddenly made available to 450 million people within a very short timeframe, and rightly so, but when a very small group of people need access to a drug, the average time period, as given to us at that committee meeting, is 477 days. We need to look at bringing about the change required to make sure people can get a drug in a timely manner. We have been talking about it. The committee on health dealt with it back in 2018. We are four years on. The time period for getting access to medication has not decreased. It is a very important issue we need to prioritise.

There are challenges within the healthcare sector on which we all need to work, such as the roll-out concerning GPs. We are talking about GPs providing services but also about a major challenge coming down the road with the GP workforce in that quite a high number of GPs are over 60 years of age. Will we have an adequate number of people to replace those GPs, given that we have a considerable increase in population? We need to have more GPs available on the front line to deliver services. We need to look at how we expedite the increase and make sure we have GPs to replace those who are retiring and an adequate number of GPs to deal with our growing population. We have been very lucky in this country in that, over the past ten years, we have increased the number of people in employment by 650,000. It is a considerable increase. We have also increased the demand for services. One of the services for which the demand has increased is healthcare. We must respond accordingly, in particular on the front line. The more GPs we have, the more people we will keep out of hospital.

I thank the Minister for bringing forward this Bill and I look forward to working with him on passing it through both Houses and on its implementation.

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