Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

At a time when trolley numbers at University Hospital Limerick, UHL, regularly achieve record figures it is beyond belief that funding for the HSE is becoming what some at the health committee meeting today described as "constrained". In this scenario "constrained" suggests that the scenes of absolute chaos we have seen at UHL or any other hospital with overcrowding pressures will not improve. The improvement in services throughout the region that we were promised when reconfiguration was first mooted was never delivered. Now, after years of incompetence, the Minister appears to have given up at the cost of patients.

When the situation became so bad that the Minister's spin no longer worked, more of a role was given to the medical assessment units in Nenagh, Ennis and St. John's Hospital. The fact remains that the impact of this is not being realised. Now we have been left in a situation whereby, unbelievably, the Minister has underfunded the health service and the room to address this situation has become as confined as the areas in which people are languishing on trolleys. They have been spiralling into the waiting areas in UHL to the despair of the staff.

To define what underfunding in this scenario means, we just have to imagine the scenes at UHL spiralling further out of control. Will the Minister tell me what effect underfunding will have on the capacity in UHL? What impact will underfunding have on the ability of the units in Nenagh, Ennis and St. John's Hospital to have any impact on trolley numbers? What impact will the recruitment freeze have on the provision of any adequate level of community care in north Tipperary? These are questions that need immediate and clear answers because we are speaking about people's lives.

Existing levels of service are clearly inadequate. If the Minister is not providing enough to cover existing levels of service he is clearly going backwards. I am calling on the Minister to step back from the brink and increase the funding allocation to adequately cover existing levels of service and cost pressures, to provide for new developments, to provide funding to advance vital projects for hospital bed capacity, to engage in community care reform, and to bring forward a supplementary budget to reverse the recruitment freeze on essential front-line posts, especially as we head into the winter, which we know will be tough on patients and staff alike. This has never been more urgent.

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