Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Bill and its ambitions are positive. Any efforts made to expand medical card eligibility to a wider group of people is something I welcome. The benefits of a medical card are multiple and the lack of one can have a detrimental impact on someone's finances as they look to avail of hospital services, maternity services and necessary GP visits. Access to a medical card removes a barrier for those who may otherwise be reluctant to visit their GP to obtain necessary treatment. I welcome the proposal in this Bill to amend the Health Act 1970 allowing for a disregard of rental income so that rent a room income will not be assessed within the medical card application. This is a useful change. We in Sinn Féin wanted to expand the medical card to an additional 400,000 people but what is proposed in this Bill is positive nonetheless.

The other key elements of this Bill pertaining to the amending of the Irish Medicines Board Act 1995 are also sensible and may serve to reduce slightly the number of people attending hospital or GP clinics for the administration of medicines that could reasonably be expected to be administered in a pharmacy by another medical professional. This and the proposal to allow the Minister for Health to make regulations that could enable pharmacists to sell and supply approved medicines without a prescription are positive, if minimal, moves that can contribute to alleviating our healthcare crises. Any move that seeks this outcome should be welcome. It is critical to the safety of the staff and patients at our hospitals that what are otherwise avoidable presentations are offered an alternative and reliable route to appropriate care.

I say this in the context of overcrowding and capacity challenges in our hospitals, particularly in University Hospital Limerick, UHL, which is in a perpetual capacity crisis. Every day so far in February, the hospital has had, on average, 116 patients treated on trolleys every single day because no bed is available. This is appalling. With a week left in the month, we have already had 1,621 people treated in this manner at UHL, which is more than in the same month last year. More than 2,000 people were treated in those conditions in the hospital in January. Importantly, these are people deemed in need of a hospital bed and yet no bed is available to them. The impact of these numbers stuck on a hospital trolley, often in a hospital corridor, is not just on those patients and the medical professionals treating them but is felt across the hospital with the cancellation of elective surgeries, the extension of hospital waiting lists and the transferring of staff to cope with the influx of presentations at the emergency department at UHL. Being treated on a trolley in a hospital corridor is to be devoid of privacy and a minimal level of comfort during an already stressful hospital stay.

Last week, I was in contact with UHL with regard to a 71-year-old man, a recovering stoke victim, who had been lying on a trolley for eight days. It is appalling that, due to the lack of capacity, a senior citizen would have to be treated in this manner. It is appalling to hear of avoidable deaths at the hospital, with staff stretched too thin and capacity too small.

I reiterate my welcoming of the proposals contained in this Bill but they must be the precursory steps to a more ambitions change in how we approach medical care in this State. The steps contained in this Bill must be the first steps of a journey that seeks to increase capacity in our hospitals, to expand community healthcare service, to reduce the numbers being treated on trolleys and to massively expand bed capacity not just at UHL but across the State. We need a universal healthcare service that would remove all cost barriers to healthcare.

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