David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with colleagues. Sinn Féin will support this motion on long Covid. I thank its authors, the Regional Group, and its proposer, Deputy Naughten, for the work he has done in this area over the past number of months.

This is an area that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health has dealt with on a number of occasions. A number of very important witnesses have appeared before that committee, including Dr. John Lambert, who was mentioned. Many of the people who have come before the committee have been quite critical, as Deputy Tóibín indicated, of the haphazard approach we are seeing in this area. There is no joined-up approach from primary care to acute services, no full roll-out of all the Covid clinics, and patients who are immunocompromised still do not have access to medications that people in other countries do. Many of these patients say to me that their nightmare continues. They are still where many of us were in March and April 2020, that is, a situation of permanent lockdown, and fearful of leaving their homes because of the danger of contracting Covid due to the profound health difficulties they have. That is very difficult for them.

Long Covid is something we are still learning about all the time and a lot of research is still being done. We need to continue to learn but also to act very quickly as new data and new research emerges. Long Covid is a complex set of conditions, with symptoms ranging from fatigue and breathing difficulties to involuntary movement and cognitive dysfunction with ranging severity. It affects people of all ages. It is troubling that we still do not have a paediatric model of care for long Covid. I have been calling for that for some time. We need to make sure we have a particular focus on children and the impact long Covid has on them. The Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, needs to expedite that as quickly as possible. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 people are affected by long Covid. The fact that we cannot determine that number is in part due to the lack of supports for general practice and GPs. The fact that many of these long Covid clinics are not operational means we are not getting the real data on how many people are suffering from or have contracted long Covid and are managing and dealing with it in very difficult circumstances. The more we do, and the more health supports and wraparound supports we give, the more evidence will emerge on precisely how many people are suffering from long Covid. If we do not understand the scale of the problem, we will not be able to commit the level of resources that need to be invested.

There is also a concern that there is excessive focus and concentration on hospital supports. That is important because there is obviously a need for such supports but many of the services people with long Covid need are rehabilitative and must be provided in the community. I mentioned primary care. Much greater understanding and more education for GPs are needed. We have overcrowding in our hospitals at present, which is almost unheard of. The number of people visiting emergency departments and waiting for long periods is phenomenal. It is a disaster in many of our acute hospitals. We are then asking people with long Covid to go into these healthcare settings, where they are part of that experience of having to wait too long. They say to me that they are fearful of going into hospitals, in some instances, because of the symptoms they have. Community settings are and would be better in such cases.

There was a call from the Mater hospital for a specialised Covid clinic to be put in place and for proper resourcing of research. I raised this with HSE officials at the health committee. Even though Dr. Lambert had made recommendations and submitted business cases, senior people in the HSE were unaware of it a number of weeks ago. I found that phenomenal. He got very frustrated and took to social media to ask what in God's name is happening that the decision makers cannot make decisions quickly enough. That is symptomatic of what happens generally in the healthcare system.

We need to get serious about this illness. Covid is still affecting many people. Long Covid is a very serious illness. Everything that we can do needs to be done. We are talking about health supports but there are also other supports, for example, if people are out sick, they need to be supported through welfare supports. A holistic package of supports is necessary.

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