John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I seek, through the Leader, clarification from the Minister for Health on a number of events in the health sector in the past week or two. I am not referring to the widely publicised spat between the Minister for Health and one of his ministerial colleagues. To anyone looking at it objectively, it is wholly predictable when we cobble together coalitions between parties of widely diverse ideologies. I do not refer to the allegations of cost overruns in the health service, which my good friend and colleague, Professor Ray Kinsella of UCD, has pointed out were not cost overruns. When one reduces the budget to a subsistence level so that people act in a subsistence fashion, and then one reduces it further, one cannot call the spending that occurs an overspend. I am not referring to the confidence motion which, with great respect, was misplaced, redundant, irrelevant and politically inspired.

I refer to the hard figures that emerged last week and which need clarification. One set of figures referred to waiting list times for appointments with specialists in hospital clinics and the other set referred to waiting times for specialist treatment in hospitals. The hospital figures looked encouraging at first because treatment times and the percentage of patients waiting for treatment had reduced. The flipside was that the waiting time to see a specialist had increased dramatically. Incredibly, in a modern western country, we have people waiting three and four years for a hospital appointment despite multiple iterations of consultant contracts and multiple iterations of administrative shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

I would like the Leader to put the following question to the Minister. Has the total waiting time metric, from GP referral to treatment, changed? I believe it has not and that the choke point has moved by lengthening the waiting time to see the consultant and, apparently and artificially, reducing the waiting time for treatment.

For clarification, a remark I made on waiting lists and abortion last week evidently caused confusion in the media. When I refer to administrative shuffling of deckchairs on the Titanic, I am not referring to a need for overtime in the maritime safety sector.