Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Tá Cumann Altraí agus Ban Cabhrach na hÉireann, IMNO, i ndiaidh líon na n-othar a bhí ar thralaithe ospidéil i mí Bealtaine a fhoilsiú. Bhí beagnach 12,000 duine ar thralaithe le linn na míosa sin agus ba leanaí iad 300 acu. Is daoine iad seo a bhí ar thralaithe sna hospidéil an mhí seo caite agus tá an figiúr níos airde ná mar a bhí i mí Eanáir i mbliana, an mhí ba mheasa ó thosaíodh cuntas na n-othar ar thralaithe. Níl aon phlean ag an Rialtas seo dul i ngleic leis an ngéarchéim seo inár seirbhíse sláinte. Yesterday, the Irish Midwives and Nurses Organisation, IMNO, published the number of patients on hospital trolleys in the month of May and these figures show that almost 12,000 people, including 300 children, were on trolleys in our hospitals last month. That figure is higher than January this year when we saw the worst levels of overcrowding in our hospitals since the IMNO started to collate these figures. This level of overcrowding at the beginning of summer is unprecedented and needs to be tackled to prevent even worse chaos this winter. The trolley crisis is no longer a seasonal event. It is a national crisis and a national scandal. Not content with making the housing crisis worse day by day, the Government has now done the same with the health services. Those crises are going to get worse every single day as long as this Government spends its time in office.

We have a situation now where nurses are working in a system in which it has been normalised for more than 500 people a day to be on trolleys in our hospitals. Behind every one of those statistics is a person. It is often a person waiting in pain for a hospital bed. In the first three months of this year, the average wait time in emergency departments for admission to a bed was almost 12 hours. It was worse for children and those over the age of 75 because, on average, they had to wait 13 hours to get a hospital bed.

Let me give an example of what that means for individuals. A 78-year-old woman from Waterford who suffers from cardiac issues had to wait 24 hours for a hospital bed. Her daughter left her at the hospital the day before and she called her mother at 3 p.m. the following day. Her mother told her on the phone that she had been diagnosed with heart failure. That 78-year-old woman was still in the same chair in which her daughter had left her the day before. It is absolutely disgraceful how our people are treated in this State under the policies of this Government. Her daughter spoke of how her mother did not even have access to a trolley, how she was not able to get any sleep the night before, take any rest or take the weight off her hips or her back. That is what is happening under this Government's watch.

This is just one of hundreds of examples we could recount on the floor of the Dáil today. The reality is that I have absolutely no confidence in the Minister or the Government tackling the hospital and trolley crisis. Why? Because it has missed targets again and again. There are record numbers on trolleys, botched recruitment schemes, soaring waiting lists and the Government is stumbling from one disaster to another. Today, we learn again of the delayed discharges across our hospital network. A strategic plan is needed to tackle overcrowding. Does the Government have one? Of course, it does not. The ESRI told us 2,500 additional beds are needed but the Government does not have a plan to deliver them. To make matters worse, it did not even provide funding in the two most recent budgets for a single additional acute bed across our hospital network. I ask a simple question on behalf of all those 12,000 people who spent time on trolleys last month. Why is the Government so incapable of getting even the basics right in tackling a national scandal that has plagued the State for more than two decades?

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