Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The constituency of Dublin North-West that I represent is served by three hospitals. The Mater hospital is a teaching hospital that provides acute and tertiary specialist services for approximately 190,000 people. The Mater hospital is also the national centre for a number of specialties, for example, spinal injuries, cardiac surgery, and heart and lung transplants. It is the home of the national isolation unit. Beaumont Hospital provides emergency and acute care services for a catchment area of around 290,000. It is also a designated cancer centre and the regional treatment centre for a number of other medical conditions. The national orthopaedic hospital in Cappagh provides a national orthopaedic service for the treatment of lower and upper limb and spinal injuries and surgery.

Throughout the country, hospitals saw record levels of inpatient cancellations over the winter months. The health system was put under extraordinary pressure with an emergency department crisis. Almost 45,000 inpatient appointments were cancelled across December and January while hospitals experienced one of the worst overcrowding crises seen in Irish hospitals. The obvious consequence of such cancellations is that a massive backlog will result, and this backlog will continue to be a source of crisis in the health service for many months to come. This has proved to be the case. The number of appointments and procedures cancelled in quarter 1 of 2023 for the Mater hospital amounted to 4,524 appointments cancelled. A significant number of these cancellations were cancer-related appointments. Beaumont Hospital had 3,559 cancellations for the same period. These cancellations are causing hospital waiting lists to spiral. Almost 8,000 people are waiting more than 18 months for their outpatient appointments at the Mater hospital. This is unacceptable.

It will take a long time to reduce such waiting lists significantly. These cancellations disrupt the work of the medical staff and can endanger the health of the patient who has to wait longer for a much-needed medical procedure. This is stressful both for the patient and for the medical staff caring for the patient. What is required urgently is an increase in healthcare capacity. In particular, there needs to be a significant increase in the number of hospital beds. We need faster implementation of recommendations of Sláintecare, especially in delivering care in dedicated external clinics, which would relieve much of the burden on the public health service. While we have too few doctors, too few beds and too few healthcare professionals and a serious lack of real investment in the health service, we will continue to have a crisis in the health service and an inability to meet the needs of patients.

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