Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue of neurology services, generally and particularly in CHO area 8 and in Laois-Offaly. It is a specific question about a specific branch of medicine in the Deputy's part of the country, which is the midlands. I do not have a detailed note on it right now but I will try to get the Deputy more information in writing this week or next week. What I can say in broader terms is that we acknowledge that neurology services are nowhere near the standard that they should be. The budget for this year provides additional funding for community-based neuro-rehabilitation teams. I am not sure if CHO 8 will be one of those but we will try to come back to the Deputy with more information over the next couple of days.

One of the issues that we have had a difficulty with is recruiting consultant neurologists around the country and that has caused waiting lists to rise in some parts of the country. We are now at the point where we have a new consultant contract, which is being offered. I understand the Irish Medical Organisation will ballot its members on that. The Irish Hospital Consultants Association will survey its members on it. We hope to be in a position to offer that in a matter of weeks. It is a very attractive offer financially. It requires consultants to phase out private practice in public hospitals and commit to the public health system. It also amends working practices so that we can get more value and make sure more patients get seen. That is a significant reform that the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, has pretty much got over the line and will bring us a big way towards achieving the vision in the Sláintecare report.

We are also training more advanced nurse practitioners. As somebody who has worked in the health service, I know the excellent work that advanced nurse practitioners do. The more of them we can train, the better. The same goes for clinical nurse specialists.

Finally, I would like to mention to the House that while we do not have the exact figures yet, we are in a position to say that we are now making progress in terms of waiting lists overall, albeit certainly not in every specialty and not in all parts of the country. As the House will be aware, in the Sláintecare report we more or less said that nobody should be waiting more than three months for a procedure or to see a specialist. We all acknowledge there will always be people waiting a few weeks, but nobody should be waiting more than three months or so to see a specialist or to have a particular procedure done, and there are Sláintecare targets in that regard. The end of year figures for 2022 would indicate that the number of people waiting more than that three-month benchmark in Sláintecare has fallen by somewhere between 4% and 10%. That is against a backdrop where we see waiting lists rise north of the Border, in Britain and across the world, against the backdrop of Covid and against the backdrop of a cyberattack. It shows that we are finally making some meaningful progress in terms of waiting lists. We intend to build on that this year.

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