Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and wish her well in her role in the Department of Health.

It is appropriate that I thank the former Minister, Stephen Donnelly, who I served for a brief period of time in the Department. I liked working with him. He achieved a great deal in the time in which he was in the Department.

Tonight, it is important to welcome the roll-out of the health app. It is hugely important. There is a need for the computerisation of the healthcare sector. In 2009 I was in Gaza and within half an hour of using my bank card, I got a call from AIB saying that it appeared someone had stolen my card. To think in Ireland we can go from one hospital to another in the same city or the same area and there is no connection as regards the transfer of records. There is a lot of catching up to do. In 1996 the Danish system started the patient card, which has all a person's medical information on one file, no matter what hospital the person is admitted to.

I was speaking to a junior doctor recently who advised me that he spends 50% of his time each day chasing records, X-rays and MRI scans because they are not put on the file. He has to get them from the relevant department to make sure they are put on the file. This goes to show the huge waste of trained professionals' time within the healthcare sector. They are not able to provide the necessary support to patients but are instead chasing records. It is important we do as much as we can over the next three to four years to computerise the entire healthcare sector.

An interesting point on healthcare is how it has been put into a five-day-week operation. We should change the whole thinking in regard to healthcare about five-day operation in many areas. All the hospitals are open seven days a week. They provide care seven days a week but many services are not available during some of those seven days. I spoke to Professor Rónán Collins today who had an interesting article in thejournal.ie about the issue of lack of access to services at weekends such as MRI scans and in certain cases, X-rays are not available. It is not possible to get professional diagnostics and social care people are not available at weekends. If one wishes to discharge an elderly patient on a Friday evening or a Saturday there is nobody there to put in place the back-up supports they need if they are being sent home. Even if they are going to a step-down facility, in many cases such facilities do not take in new patients or new residents at weekends. We need to look at that area to make the health service more efficient. It needs to have a full seven-day turnaround. I agree with the Minister about consultants being available at weekends. However, other personnel also need to be available so that if the consultant decides to discharge someone, there is backup support and a mechanism for moving the patient into a step-down facility.

The other issue relates to primary care. Primary care is very much a five-day-week operation. We need to look long term about how we can develop it into at least a six-day operation. If an elderly patient is discharged home, someone is needed to keep in contact with that patient but there is no support out there for medical support. The only way to follow up is for the person to come back into the hospital. We need to look at developing either a six- or seven-day primary care system.

In regard the issue of transferring people out of nursing homes into hospitals, some of the hospitals in Cork and Dublin have teams that can go to a nursing home and assess the patient in order that instead of the patient being transferred into hospital, the team prescribes the course of treatment for that patient in the nursing home. The nursing home is now covered. There are no concerns that the family might be unhappy with the level of care. They know that they have the support of the medical team from the hospital. We need to roll that out across the entire country so that every nursing home has access to a hospital team rather than having people admitted. In one case in Dublin more than 300 people were assessed and only 20 had to be admitted to hospital. We need to work with both public and private nursing homes on that.

In relation to the roll-out of services within the HSE, one community hospital, namely, the Millstreet community unit, has been finished for some time with an additional ten beds. My understanding is that those ten beds are still not occupied. The building work has been completed but it has not received HIQA approval. HIQA approval was only applied for in January. It could have been applied for a lifetime ago. I ask the Minister to look at those issues.

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