Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I agree that the current situation in too many hospitals, although not all, is unacceptable. I think we all agree that it is especially the case in respect of older people who are waiting too long. As the Deputy quite rightly said, those figures are averages and do not include the people who are waiting on trolleys for 24 hours, 48 hours or longer. It is not an acceptable situation.

The HSE is now, at my request, finalising two planned approaches to urgent and emergency care. The first is a plan for the rest of this year and through the winter of next year. We will publish that in the coming weeks. It will be published this month, as it is now June. A three-year improvement plan to build on that will be published in the autumn. Overcrowding, as we are aware, is now a year-round challenge and these programmes are looking to make sustainable change and not just the addition of one-off resources for the winter. We are looking at fundamental structural change here.

The Deputy's question also alludes to elective centres. The national elective ambulatory care strategy was agreed in 2021 to try to decouple emergency care from scheduled care to the greatest extent possible. As he will be aware, we are proceeding with stand-alone elective hospitals in Cork, Galway and Dublin. The business cases for Cork and Galway were approved last year and the business case for Dublin will be with me very shortly. The Departments of Health and Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform and the HSE are proceeding with parallel processing so we can move to sign off on the detailed design as quickly as possible this year before moving out to tender so we can get diggers on site as quickly as possible.

The final piece, as the Deputy will be aware, is the surgical hubs, the locations of most of which I announced last Friday. One of those will go into University Hospital Waterford. Based on the impact of surgical hubs in Tallaght hospital, I believe they can be of substantial benefit to patients and, critically, in a much shorter time than it will take for the elective hospitals to start treating patients.

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