Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this motion to the House. I am supporting it because my experience has been that there are serious issues in the health service. We are in this position because of a political choice by the Government to underfund our health services. We will now see plans to recruit an extra 7,000 needed staff scrapped. The recruitment freeze will continue into next year. That is what the Government’s decision to underfund the HSE by €1.4 billion looks like. The Government has reversed course. It realised it was wrong on the health budget only a little over a month after everyone else realised it was wrong. The Government added an extra €960 million for this year but it is still not enough. It is still an underfunding, especially with increased demand and inflation. There is still no word on reversing the recruitment freeze either.

According to the INMO, in September alone, we had more than 1,000 children on trolleys and a total of 87,321 people on trolleys from January to September. What will this look like in a month’s time as we face into our annual and worsening winter health crisis, with a recruitment freeze and a hundreds of millions missing from the HSE budget? What does this look like for people on the ground? I have a letter from the Coombe hospital's gynaecology section, in reply to a question I put from a constituent, saying that waiting lists are so long because of a lack of clinical nursing specialists. It goes on to say this is now compounded by a widespread recruitment freeze. That letter is from the communications manager in the Coombe hospital. She goes on to mention a recruitment freeze for all staff, with the exception of consultants and graduate nurses and midwives. That is the reality for people waiting on those lists.

I raised the issue last week of two women I have been representing. They have been waiting in pain for years for care due to a lack acute hospital beds for their aftercare, and in no small part because of the lack of staff. I have repeatedly raised the situation in the Old County Road primary healthcare centre, where for more than a year there have been no three or ten-month developmental checks due to the lack of nurses. I have also raised the issue of Curlew Road healthcare centre and Limekiln Lane healthcare centre, which are also not offering the three or ten-month developmental checks due to a lack of nurses. We know those developmental checks are massively important to any child's future health.

One of the women I have represented was due to have a hernia operation back in 2019. She was referred to the National Treatment Purchase Fund in early 2020 just before Covid. The private hospital to which she was referred would not perform the operation because the surgery was very complicated and as we know, the private healthcare sector is not interested in complicated cases but only in simple cases like knee operations, which is where the money is. The woman has been left languishing on the waiting list since then. I have submitted three parliamentary questions on her behalf in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Her stomach is so extended now that the operation is going to take five hours because her organs will have to be put back in place. The Government is saying that there is no crisis in bed availability but that is the reality for one woman. I also represented a young girl with scoliosis in 2018 who waited for four years for an operation on her back. Earlier this year the screws in her back became loose and the bones started coming away from the rod. She is in severe pain but has been told by Tallaght University Hospital that it cannot do the operation because it does not have an acute bed to link in with her surgery. That is the reality for people on the ground. I cannot understand how the Minister could come in and say what he said.

We had 1,278 people die last winter alone due to delays in care. That is a damning indictment of how our health system is being run. People are being let down time and time again because this Government and successive governments led by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and the Labour Party, have failed to reform our health service or fund it adequately in its current capacity.

What we have seen from the Government this year is less money, fewer staff and less services. There has been no real progress on Sláintecare and no hint of the resources and political will needed to transform our health service into a better public system. Health austerity, underfunding of staff and budget cuts are not reforms but a way of keeping our public system on life support in an attempt to pass the issue over to whoever gets the health portfolio next.

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