Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy McDonald for raising important issues in our health service and recruitment into our health service. Of course, the reason we talk about numbers of people working in our health service is because we all want to see improved patient outcomes and improved patient wait times. I will dwell on that in a moment.

A bit of context that is important when we are discussing health services is health recruitment and the health budget. The Government recently announced €25.8 billion of a budget for the delivery of health services next year, the highest budget for health ever in the history of the State. It represents an increase of more than 43% from when this Government came to office. When this Government came to office, we were spending €18.1 billion on health; we are now spending €25.8 billion. It is important we have some context in terms of the huge levels of investment of public money we are putting in. As a result, as of August of this year, there are 27,901 more staff working in the Irish public health service - it has nothing to do with private - than there were at the beginning of 2020. As for what this means in reality, it means 9,375 additional nurses and midwives, 4,092 additional health and social care professionals, and 3,330 more doctors and dentists. These are factual figures. I presume the Deputy accepts them. There are now nearly 28,000 more people working in the health service than when this Government came to office. By any measure or means or any fair discussion, that is a very significant increase.

In fact, last year, despite what we hear in this House, we saw the largest recruitment ever into the HSE since its foundation. The largest level of increased recruitment ever in the history of the HSE took place last year, something that the Deputy forgot to mention in her earlier comments.

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