David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the speakers who supported the motion. I also acknowledge that the Government is not opposing the motion but I ask the Minister of State present and the Cabinet to go much further and deliver on the recommendations. As my colleague an Teachta Conway-Walsh said, in reality, given the news today, we need a general election and we need to give the people the opportunity to vote for the Government they want and a Government that will actually deal with the many challenges we have in our health service.

I have no problem in welcoming and acknowledging the putting in place of the enhanced community care model, which was a very positive development in recent years. For a long time, I and my party have been calling for multidisciplinary teams working in the community at primary care and community care level, providing supports to older people and people with chronic diseases, for example, to keep them away from acute hospitals, which is really important. We have to build on that. It is one of the important foundations to building up primary community care but also to take pressure away from our acute hospitals.

Again, I welcome and acknowledge that the number of training places for GPs has increased in recent years. However, we also have real pressures in many parts of the country and in many communities. Very often when we hear about a shortage of GPs, people will rightly point to rural areas where we have a dire shortage of GPs. I gave an example of it in south Kerry in the Cahersiveen and Waterville area. I attended a public meeting without the permission of some of the Kerry TDs, as they pointed out earlier. It was very important for me to go down and listen at first hand to people who were telling me their stories of having to wait days on end to access a GP. An area that had six GPs at its height is now operating with one full-time GP and one locum. It is also an issue in urban areas.

While we have more GPs in training at the moment, we also have a growing population and an ageing population. We need to acknowledge that many people cannot even register with a GP. People are waiting longer to access a GP. We are also asking GPs to do more when in fact we could be looking at other elements of the health service, like pharmacists, as our motion points out, to take pressure away from GPs. There have been some small moves in all of these areas. I call them small moves because that is what they are. They are not revolutionary and are not as decisive as they could have been and should have been. We can do much more with primary care, with pharmacists and with GPs if we have the vision and the plan but, more importantly, if we put the resources into it.

I cannot let this motion pass and conclude without acknowledging that, in the budget just gone, the Government did not even provide the health service with enough money to stand still. It provided for about €100 million of new measures, which is a drop in the ocean relative to the overall funding for the health service. That means it does not matter what the Minister thinks. He does not have the resources for this entire year to build up capacity across primary and community care. Worse still, we now have a recruitment freeze and recruitment embargo in place at the time when we have so many trainees who are going through a range of training courses in many areas. They will be coming out of those training places and will not be given a job in the public system because of a crazy recruitment embargo which, again, came from a bad decision the Government made with the budget.

I passionately believe we can actually deal with the problems in our hospitals and in our emergency departments by doing the simple things. Very often I listen to politicians who think the answers are complicated and we have to come up with all sorts of novel ideas. It is very simple. Healthcare needs capacity. Healthcare is about people treating people. If we do not have the people, including the GPs, if we are not making best use of pharmacists, and if hospitals do not have beds or do not have access to recovery beds, step-down beds and convalescence beds in the community, it results in pressures in the system and people waiting on trolleys. That is just one example of everything going wrong at the same time in our health service.

I again acknowledge that the Government is not opposing the motion. However, it should go further by looking at its recommendations and implementing them.

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