Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue on healthcare in Ireland. On behalf of the Government, and I am sure all Deputies in the House would share this, we commend all the staff within the HSE and the health service who work so diligently 365 days of the year, are totally committed to our people and are providing as best a service as they can. The Government is committed to supporting that. I will turn to some facts. There is no question about it that there are cases. The Deputy has highlighted a couple of them. I do not have the background detail to those but I turn to the facts of what Government is actually doing. We are investing record funding in our health service. The Government has allocated €23.6 billion net to the health budget for this year; current and capital. That is an extra €5.6 billion and 32% over the original net budget allocation for 2020. These are the facts of what Government is doing. More than 20,000 net additional staff have been hired into our health service since the beginning of 2020. This includes 6,281 nurses and midwives, 3,177 health and social care professionals and 1,948 doctors and dentists. These are the real facts. In the three years since the Government has come in, 2020, 2021 and 2022 have seen the biggest staff increases in the HSE since it was established. Those are the facts. That is what is being done and 2023 continues to show extremely large increases in that space.

The Deputy spoke about acute beds. I ask him to turn to the facts and recognise what has been done. As of mid-March, 970 new acute hospital beds had been opened nationally since 2020. By the end of this year, the HSE is due to have added 1,179 beds against a target of 1,146. We now have 323 adult critical care beds, which is an increase of 65 beds or 25% since 2020. The Department of Health and the HSE are planning a refresh of the 2018 health service capacity review, which was scheduled following the Central Statistics Office review, and that will be done and released later this year. Overall, as part of national development plan, NDP, funding, the health sector has an allocation of €5.657 billion for the period 2021 to 2025, which is an 11% increase on funding year-on-year. This week, more than 500 health capital projects and programmes across the State and the sector are under way at various stages of development. The capital programme for 2023 is being developed and the HSE Capital Plan 2023 has been published by the Minister. That health capital plan in 2023 will help with the construction and equipping of healthcare facilities. It is worth €967 million with a further €50 million provided for capital infrastructure resulting from Covid-19 actions and an additional €10 million for income generated in 2022.

Those are the facts of what Government is doing and investing in our health service. There is no question that there will be instances in hospitals across the country where people will spend longer in chairs or on trolleys than they should. Our job as a Government is to scale up the health service and the resources within the HSE and the Department of Health and that is actually what we are doing. We are underpinning that by a capital plan that further expands the health infrastructure we have for care within the community. I have outlined the facts but what I have not heard from Sinn Féin, bar criticism of apparent Government inaction, is what its alternative plans are in this space. I have told the Deputy about the increased capacity and staff numbers, which are at record levels, between nurses, doctors, midwives, dentists, and right the way through. That is actually happening now. Where cases present, and I am aware of them myself, hospitals have to do everything they can to make sure that waiting times for patients are reduced to the bare minimum.

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