Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

From what I understand of these amendments, I welcome what the Minister of State is saying there and the provision for the making of regulations.

Given the shortages of healthcare staff, we need to maximise the capacity of all existing staff and services. Community pharmacies have particular benefits for the roll-out of different health initiatives, not least because they are in every single community and are very accessible. To a large extent, people feel freer about going into a community pharmacy. Generally speaking, there is a strong relationship between what I would call customers of pharmacies, who are also patients, and the pharmacies. That relationship has strengthened in recent years. It makes a lot of sense, given the shortage of GPs, but from the point of view of the efficiency of the health service, it just does not make any sense not to maximise the use and capacity of community pharmacies.

The Minister of State did not refer to the term "chronic illness". Am I right in assuming that is one area she is speaking about? We know that about 70% of healthcare activity relates to chronic illness. We also know that the bulk of chronic illness is lifestyle related. It makes sense to provide all the capacity available to deal with this and to advise people of changes they could make to their lifestyle and medication, and have that kind of monitoring and screening. That would include things like weight management, blood pressure measuring and cholesterol. All of those areas could be easily done well by community pharmacists. I hope that we are moving towards that. I would just like to hear from the Minister of State that she is actually talking about chronic illness management.

In my experience, we have been talking about better chronic illness management for at least 20 years. In the last ten years, the six or seven chronic illnesses have taken up significant time for doctors and hospitals. They could be addressed at a much earlier stage, which is obviously what we should be doing. We should be identifying conditions which may get much more serious, with people ending up in hospital. If there was early intervention and much more focus on prevention, we would be able to tackle those and reduce the exceptionally high level of chronic illness. I welcome what I think the Minister of State is saying. I would like her to confirm that we are talking about chronic illnesses. I will hold my comments on the availability of oral contraceptives off prescription until my amendment comes up.

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