Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I know where the Minister of State is coming from. While I was listening to her I was thinking we should not be bringing these cases up because people have responsibilities and they are in jobs to provide these services. In her response the Minister of State mentioned the DPS. While there is no limit set a valid prescription is a cost to people, which is a separate issue. I refer to the idea of there being "too much or too little product". When it is causing that much stress to a family and they have to go to their Dáil Deputy, who tries all the angles to go through the HSE to try to get this solved and it ends up being discussed in the Dáil, then there has to be a breakdown somewhere. My wife always kills me when I make the following point but is it not better to be looking at it than looking for it? While we are sitting here that family does not have the answers. I will be talking to them afterwards and I will tell them it will hopefully be addressed now.

I know where the Minister of State’s response is coming from and it mentions: "too much or too little product, which is not optimal for the individual person or their families". We talk about carers and they are the individuals who have been involved for the longest length of time so to me they are the experts. If you are dealing with the district health nurse and saying that two, five or ten items is not enough then surely that should be taken on trust. People are not hoarding these products to sell them. I appreciate the Minister of State's response and she is right that I should not be raising this matter here. I am just afraid that if a precedent is being set here and if families and their loved ones are suffering because of the lack of a simple necessity. This could not be taken away from a child for example. I spoke to a mother very recently and I mentioned something about this and she said she did not know how many nappies she was going to use on her child that day. There should be a common sense approach to this and there should be trust between families and the health system.

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