Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I second the amendment by Senator Mullen.

I am calling for a debate with the Minister for Health on what seems to be the perennially unsolvable issue of wait times for essential lifesaving procedures in this country. We all read the harrowing details of the 17-year-old girl named as Ivy in the report of the Ombudsman for Children late last week, who could not breathe at times as her spinal curvature deteriorated from 30 degrees to 135 degrees over the span of her five-year wait for spinal infusion surgery.

Progressive scoliosis usually requires early surgical intervention, and the earlier, the better. For a teenager to have been subjected to a five-year wait for this surgery is the latest in what seems like a never-ending string of damning indictments of our national healthcare system. Of course, this is not a cherry-picked outlier. As the report notes, 309 children and their families, as of May 2023, were waiting for scoliosis treatment in Ireland. Something is dreadfully wrong with the HSE. There appears to be systemic failure at an organisational level in our bloated healthcare system, which remains the most expensive of the EU 15 on the basis of national income.

Every citizen of this country pays an absolute premium through their taxes to keep the HSE up and running. You would be hard-pressed to find one of them who would say they get premium healthcare in exchange for it. Have no fear, the Government has vowed to fix it. In 2017, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, insisted that "by the end of this year, no child will have to wait longer than four months for a scoliosis procedure". That was five years ago. While Ivy has now received her treatment, those 309 children are still walking this Government's boulevard of broken policies. Perhaps the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, might come before us and add another brick to that road?