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

I thank the Deputy for raising the important issue of the various challenges that affect our health service. As somebody who has worked in the public health service for seven years and has served as Minister for Health and as Taoiseach, I am not in any denial about the challenges faced by patients or staff in our health service. There are certainly too many patients waiting too long to see a specialist or get the procedure that they need. We have a chronic problem of emergency department overcrowding. However, we should not ignore the many very good things about our health service. I am disappointed the Deputy could not find even ten or 20 seconds in her remarks to acknowledge some of the successes of our health service and some of the high-quality health services provided by our healthcare professionals, including our nurses and midwives.

We have now, in Ireland, the longest life expectancy in the European Union. The young people who are here from Ashbourne Community School are likely to live longer than anyone else in the EU and that is in part down to the quality of our health service. People face real difficulties getting access to it, but there is real quality and there are very good patient outcomes once people access it. We have the highest life expectancy in the EU. We should be proud of having achieved that as a nation. I am sorry the Deputy was not able to acknowledge it.

We have dramatically improving outcomes for patients when it comes to stroke, heart attack and cancer, outperforming the NHS both in Northern Ireland and in Britain on patient outcomes and doing so by quite a distance. We are now seeing waiting times fall. We set out very clearly in the Sláintecare report that nobody should wait more than ten to 12 weeks for an operation he or she needs, or to see a specialist. It varies from month to month, but the number of patients waiting for longer than ten to 12 weeks has been coming down, whereas in most countries we have seen that going up. I think that is significant. We anticipate the number will fall further this year. We are also making real improvements on affordability, especially as it relates to reducing the cost of medicines, free contraception, expanding GP visit cards and bringing in funding for IVF this year. Thus, real change is being made in affordability.

The Deputy mentioned the issue of capacity. We have a capacity review. It has been published already and we are implementing it. Since this Government came to office, approximately 1,000 additional hospital beds and hundreds of additional community beds have been added to the system. They are needed because of our rising population, our ageing population and all of the new treatments that are now available to our patients. We have more people working in our public health service than ever was the case before. That includes approximately 6,000 more doctors, nurses and midwives since this Government came to office. There is a very real challenge in recruiting and retaining staff, but we are increasing the number of staff we have, including front-line staff such as doctors, nurses and midwives, every year. That is what the Government is doing and we are continuing to develop and improve on that plan as the years go on.

See this speech in context