Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There are a few things in the Minister of State's response that I find quite concerning. The first is that it is quite a hands-off response. It sort of says, "We have done what we can do and now it is up to the clinicians and the people suffering from this to lobby the drug manufacturers to get them to put the application in." That is not good enough. There is an issue. If, as the Minister of State says, the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, recognises it as an issue, he should be looking for solutions to help women in order that the supports that were put in place in January of this year are available to people, women can access the drug for free and there is not a discrepancy between people who can afford to go privately and those who are forced to suffer alone with this.

The other thing is that the response states that "the expertise of a specialist in the relevant field is necessary to ensure safe usage". GPs prescribe this - it is not that they do not - and if anyone knows a pregnant woman, it is her GP. The GP is the specialist and the person with the medical and personal knowledge of the woman to enable him or her to prescribe this. I do wonder whether the Minister had any discussions with consultants when it came to coming up with the solution because it seems to me that not only does the process not work for pregnant people but it is not working for consultants either. They have not been told what they are meant to do. No consultant would have the time to have people coming in through accident and emergency to try to get prescriptions written. Consultants do not do that. It seems completely outside their area to have people come through the hospital system, through accident and emergency, to get them to write prescriptions, particularly considering the winter we have had, when hospitals have been telling people to stay away. Now we are saying that a woman who is vomiting so much that she cannot lift her head off a chair has to go sit in an accident and emergency department, in an area where respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, and everything else is going around. We are sending these highly vulnerable women through accident and emergency to beg for prescriptions from consultants who do not have the forms, do not know how to go through the process and are not in a position to prescribe the drug. It just does not make any sense.

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