Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Rural Independents for bringing forward this motion. Rural healthcare, and particularly GP services, is in crisis across every constituency. Certainly across my constituency, we continually have people contacting our office. These are people who have moved into the area or who have moved from Dublin or abroad but they cannot get a GP. All of the GPs are full. That is the message we hear everywhere. It is really at crisis point and needs to be dealt with, with great urgency.

Dentistry was also mentioned and I know that in the past five years the number of dentists accepting medical cards has halved across the country. That is also a service which is equally in absolute crisis. We need to get the services in place. In some communities which are growing and where more people are coming to live in an area, that is not being matched by an increase in services. That is the real problem we have.

We had a little bit of good news yesterday. I see that Ballyshannon Community Hospital is due to open, which is good news. There is a list of all the services that will be provided, such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, dieticians and all of these things. It looks great on paper. However, the problem is that when people go looking for those services, they are not there. That is a really serious issue across every constituency, and particularly across my constituency of Sligo-Leitrim and south Donegal.

We need to recognise that if the Government is going to be able to provide these services, it must invest in them. The Minister of State mentioned in her speech that more people were going through the service and that more people were being recruited - GPs and so on - but it simply is not enough. What needs to happen is that the HSE needs to directly employ GPs in communities where they are not able to sustain them because of the present system. An awful lot of GPs do not want to become self-employed contractors. They want to be employed properly. That is something the HSE needs to do with urgency because it is the only way we will resolve these problems.

Another issue is physiotherapy. In Manorhamilton hospital, which deals an awful lot with elderly people, particularly across north Leitrim, the physiotherapy service there, which was a five-day service, has been reduced to a part-time with a person who comes two days per week to deal with both inpatients and outpatients. It is a hospital which specialises, in many cases, in rheumatoid arthritis and people who are recovering from strokes and issues like that. To see the service being cut to such a level means that this creates huge waiting lists and anxiety, particularly among elderly people in that region. I ask the Minister of State to deal with those couple of issues in particular.

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