Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The improvements I am talking about have been achieved by our healthcare professionals and I acknowledge that.

We rightly spend a lot of time talking about hospital-based care but look at what has happened in community-based care, again as called for under Sláintecare. My constituency does not have a big hospital. We do not have a model 3 or model 4 hospital but in my time, I have opened four primary care centres in County Wicklow, in Bray, Arklow, Rathdrum and Baltinglass. Planning permission has gone in for a centre in Greystones and there will be an expansion in Wicklow town. This is just in County Wicklow. We have given a significant money to day care centres and meals and wheels. We are expanding the community nursing centres. We have allocated €5.5 million to cancer support groups all over the country. In my constituency, funding has been given to Purple House in Bray, Greystones, Wicklow town, Arklow, Rathdrum, Roundwood and west Wicklow. These are just some of the community-based improvements in healthcare in a county that does not have a major hospital.

I apologise if I am a little agitated but I come in here again and again and hear certain Deputies in this House saying that nothing is improving. The Deputies over there talked about cataracts. Here is what is happening with cataracts. Until this Government came into office, the waiting time for cataract procedure for adults in Dublin was five to six years. It is now less than 12 months and falling to the agreed Sláintecare targets.

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