Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I found it astounding and outrageous that when outlining his top priorities as Taoiseach, Deputy Leo Varadkar did not even mention the health crisis in this country as one of his priorities. The implementation of Sláintecare was supposed to be directed from the Taoiseach's office but it has not been. That office should have responsibility to drive it. There has to be political will to deal with its implementation. This clearly shows the attitude of this Government that these problems cannot be solved, so we just move from crisis to crisis. The political will has to be there. This is all while we have a record number of people in our emergency departments, with close to 1,000 people on trolleys, chairs and, in some cases, on floors. The fundamental cause of this crisis is the reduction of beds in our health service over the past three decades. In 1981, we had 19,000 hospital beds. In 2022, we had 12,000 hospital beds. This is in a period where our population has grown by 1 million and got older.

Experts suggest that the lack of timely access to healthcare in the country could be responsible for more than 300 unneeded deaths every year. This is simply not acceptable. Almost one person a day dies because of a public health service that does not function and does not give people access to the care to which they are supposed to be entitled, despite the Trojan work hospital staff do every day of the week. If the Government does not act now, it means it is continuing to accept the situation.

The Irish Medical Organisation has called for a further 5,000 beds to help to fix this problem fundamentally. The cost of that is roughly the same as the €5 billion budget surplus the Government has, so funding should not be an issue in providing those 5,000 beds over the next period along with the necessary staffing. We need to end the crisis in recruitment and retention and to provide better training and opportunities. We should be thinking outside the box by delivering a programme to train doctors, nurses, therapists and so on. The State should pay for that training and get those workers to commit to staying in the country for at least eight years as a way of resolving the retention crisis. We need to end the terrible working conditions for staff. Burnout is at an all-time high and this Government is sleepwalking into a conflict with the nurses' union. It would help if young people working in the health service could afford to live in this country. We cannot see a repeat of the climbdown. This Government should proceed with the reforms of consultants' contracts. Anybody would be willing to accept a job with nearly €250,000 in wages. It is ridiculous.

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