Results 17,701-17,720 of 49,836 for speaker:Stephen Donnelly

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: There is certainly a clear understanding at a European health minister level that significant investment is required in the systems in place to deal with pandemics, including the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, the European Medicines Agency, EMA, and other groups. We know that in Ireland, regardless of what happens at a European institution level, significant...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: The principle is already enshrined in the regulations in terms of being exempt from mandatory hotel quarantine and being able move to home quarantine, for example, if you can show you are fully vaccinated. The EU digital green certificate is built on the exact premise that there are things you can do because you pose less of a risk to other people. It is less about protecting the individual...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I absolutely am. I restate that this all boils down to a question of whether services that must be provided for women can be stopped because of a religious ethos. We know that has influenced things in the past. My unambiguous position on the matter is that will not be allowed to happen. I have sought assurances that is the case, based on the new governance structure, and have absolutely...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I can tell the Deputy that there will be no hospital created or put in place that denies women access to any of those services. I would be happy to engage in a lot of detail to ensure all of the issues are addressed.

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: The short answer is "Yes". A new team called the workforce planning unit was set up last year and those are exactly the issues at which it is looking. As the Deputy knows, Laura Magahy leads the Sláintecare team. One of the things they are doing is the area-based analysis to see how many of each specialty we need in all of the areas, which will give us the gap and will allow us to hire...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: That is right. The Sláintecare team is doing the area-based analysis and then there is a different team, which is the workforce planning team.

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: They are reporting on an ongoing basis. There is not a big single report they are doing. They are looking at it profession by profession and working their way through it. They would be in regular contact, for example, with higher education on places that need to be made available.

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: That is no problem. I will ask for an update for the committee.

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: It was in Glasgow, where they bought a private hospital and I think they bought the hotel beside it as well, so people could be rested and prepared. What I can tell the Deputy is that it is the Sláintecare team that is doing the elective hospital work and its thinking is around the day case. It is not because we do not need more inpatient beds, and we all know we do. It is really...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: On the increase in eligibility and, essentially, the reduction in cost, we increased GP care last year and there are no plans to increase that further this year. However, there are plans in further years to do so. Excuse me, what was the second part of the question?

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: There are two big budgets. There is a new budget of €58 million and that is looking partly at what the Deputy has referenced, which is e-health innovation. Obviously, telemedicine was a huge success as part of the Covid response and we are looking to put that on a permanent footing. There are also some really exciting things happening. There are pilots going on around the system...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: Let me get the Deputy an update on that. What I can tell her is that in the Estimates we are looking at right now, there are two pieces. There is the €58 million for e-health innovation for the new things, and then there is money in capital for the backbone, for the infrastructure and for things like unique patient identifiers and making sure the GP systems talk to the local acute...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: That is no problem.

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I thank the Deputy. The capital funding is right through the budget. There are two big pieces: the Covid funding and the non-Covid funding. The new Covid measures are €2.121 billion and there is a capital allocation within that of €155 million. Then, obviously, there are the new measures of €1.163 billion, and the capital funding in there is an additional €13...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I share the Deputy's concern. I will also be talking with some of the mental health clinicians, teachers, school principals and parents. They have seen a worrying spike in eating disorders among younger people during the pandemic, especially among younger women and girls. It is really concerning. With the numbers in front of us, we have a significant increase in mental health funding. I...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: The answer is "Yes". We have allocated funding for MCAP this year for the first time. The Deputy has been a very strong advocate for this and he will be very aware that the programme has been in place for some time but there has never been any funding for it. This year we are allocating several million euro from the new drugs budget. We must wait to see what the uptake is. Several...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I thank the Chairman for his questions. As the committee will be aware, the capital budget for the children's hospital, including the three satellites, is €1.433 billion. There will be commissioning costs on top of that. However, that figure does not take into account the impact of Covid-19. It would not be appropriate for me to speculate at this time as to what that might cost,...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: We will need to see how that situation evolves. The current position is that the vaccines are incredibly effective and very safe. As the Chairman rightly stated, there are side effects within the normal parameters of people being vaccinated. For the moment, that is the focus. We are aware of a number of challenges to hotel quarantine. I can share with the committee that, when the...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: On universal access to primary care, including free GP care, I agree. It is worth saying that the measures we brought in towards the end of last year increased the total number by several hundred thousand children. The Deputy was critical of it at the time, as is her right, because she wants more to happen faster, but several hundred thousand children - I will seek the actual figure - were...

Select Committee on Health: Estimates for Public Services 2021
Vote 38 - Health (Revised) (27 Apr 2021)

Stephen Donnelly: I thank members for their time, questions and ideas. There are several pieces of follow-up work that we will do, be it on the National Maternity Hospital and various technical notes people have. My view is that this is a really exciting budget. It is a lot of money. There is a lot of technical stuff happening in the background in respect of financial reporting and IT systems on e-health...