Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Oireachtas health committee has consistently heard from health service workers and their unions that staff are at constant risk of burnout. Recruitment and retention remain at crisis levels as young graduates seek better pay and working conditions elsewhere, despite their express wish to remain in Ireland. This makes it impossible to legislate for mandatory staffing levels in hospitals as what staff we have we cannot keep and we are increasingly unable to replace those who leave. If we do not have key staff, hardly any other initiative will make a meaningful impact on healthcare reform.

There are nearly 900,000 people on waiting lists out of a population of around 5 million in the South. That is one in five people on a waiting list, some for months and others for years, often in pain, many on heavy medication and suffering further, waiting on procedures or elective surgeries that could have a transformative impact on their quality of life. The longer we leave them on waiting lists, the greater chance there is that complications will arise and their health conditions will get worse. One constituent, a double amputee, with whom I was dealing recently, was trying to gain access to an obesity clinic and will have to wait for years. The longer patients go without treatments, it could lead to things getting worse and to heart conditions or organ damage. By leaving people untreated, we create more for the services down the line. It is inhumane and makes no sense from a medical or financial perspective.

We need a real and actionable plan and the Government’s policies have us bouncing from crisis to crisis. Ordinary workers and families are suffering. We need a five- and ten-year health service capacity roadmap and we need to know what we need, when we are going to build and how much it will cost. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past which have led to a still-to-be-finished children’s hospital already being the most expensive in the world. We need a strategic workforce plan which develops, trains and retains doctors, nurses and allied health and social care professionals. We need to safely staff the health service and deliver universal healthcare.

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