Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is obvious that the Labour Party welcomes this Bill, which will remove the public inpatient charge of €80 per day up to a maximum of €800 per year. We know that this change is significant and it is important people do not feel like they will be unable to pay their bill when they go to hospital. The notion of people avoiding going to hospital because of inpatient charges is in and of itself enough to justify the removal of these charges. I for one, and a lot of people, believe healthcare should be available to all who need it, regardless of how much they can afford. It should never be about a case of affordability; it should always be about being able to access timely and necessary care. The abolition of these charges is significant but the real value will come only if people can actually access those healthcare services. I do not want to sound like a broken record by talking about some of the things we already have spoken about but we know that waiting lists are still very long. There is a wait to be seen to get a diagnosis and then there is a second waiting list, which is waiting to actually get the procedures and treatments. As there are still insufficient hospital beds and insufficient staff to serve those beds, the crisis in healthcare unfortunately runs a lot deeper than inpatient charges. I do not want to take away from the fact this is very welcome, whether it is talking over the dinner table with my family about those charges or when people who are in distress contact me about them. To a lot of people, €800 may not seem like a lot of money but it is a great deal of money to an awful lot of people. I have spoken to people who have said they have put off attending accident and emergency departments. In common with many people in this Chamber, I have a visceral reaction when people say they are not going because they cannot afford it. I feel that somewhere in my gut. I very much welcome this Bill.

I will not do a round-table discussion of every hospital in Ireland and the various different problems but I will mention my Labour Party colleague, Councillor Conor Sheehan. We hear once or twice per week, if not three or four times every week about the issues in University Hospital Limerick and how it is underfunded, understaffed, and has fewer beds per capitacompared with the other six acute hospital groups. I will put that on the record. I will mention again the impact of this crisis on both patients and staff. We talk quite regularly about nurses and midwives, paramedics who are dealing with demand and who are at breaking point, and tens of thousands of healthcare workers who are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout. The Labour Party had its conference over the weekend and Ms Phil Ni Sheaghdha of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, spoke about the impact the health crisis is having on both patients and the staff working there because while a hospital is a place of healthcare, it is also a workplace and it needs to be considered as such. We know and agree the HSE has a duty to provide a safe environment for all health workers and patients and we have also discussed here the INMO's plans to ballot because they feel they have unsafe staff nursing levels and I hope we do not find ourselves in that situation. I will not go on and on. As we need to remove financial barriers from people accessing healthcare, this Bill is incredibly welcome. It might be the only time I will ever say that we can happily high-speed it through and I for once will not stand up and say we are flying legislation through and so on. This is perfectly reasonable legislation to move through both Houses at a fairly lively pace.