Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On hospital overcrowding and the delay where elective surgeries are cancelled because of beds being occupied, it is welcome that the number waiting to be discharged has fallen below 500. It is still too high at around 436. I received a note this morning from Nursing Homes Ireland stating that 834 beds are vacant in 210 nursing homes nationwide. There is a proposal from the Minister to build prefabs to accommodate new hospital beds and while I have no difficulty with that, we also must look at other options that are available. We used prefabs for schools and we need to look at this carefully. One possibility we must consider, where we can plan and deliver very fast, is step-down facilities quite close to existing hospitals. We have not done that in Ireland although we seem to be able to build barriers to looking at new ideas. We must consider matters carefully before we start using prefabs as we did in respect of schools. It ended up with a huge cost to the State. The previous Government tried to remove prefabs from schools and were we to go down this road for hospitals, would we be doing the same thing in ten or 15 years' time, that is, trying to remove the prefabs from hospital grounds? We particularly need to look at what is available already. As Nursing Homes Ireland has 834 vacant beds available in private nursing homes, it is about co-operation between the health services and the private sector on this matter.