Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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198. To ask the Minister for Health the staffing benchmarks she is aiming to implement in primary care services for young people where waiting lists across disciplines are in crisis; if she will accordingly suspend the Pay and Numbers Strategy and undertake a comprehensive recruitment drive based on those benchmarks, as well as recruiting additional staff in the short and medium term to help address waiting lists that now far exceed the capacity of a fully staffed service; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [52503/25]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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It is important to recognise that overall activity within the eight core primary care therapies is significant. Almost 1.4 million patients were seen in 2024. However, I fully acknowledge that waiting lists for primary care therapies have increased significantly.

I am very conscious of the vital role that primary care therapies play for children and adults. I am acutely aware of the central role that these services play in offering the opportunity for early and cost-effective interventions for children and young people.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) has advised that the increased pressure and demand on primary care therapy services is related to an increase in referrals, the increasing complexity of presentations (leading to longer interventions), and challenges related to recruitment and retention of healthcare professionals in general and specialist services in the community.

Building on successful local initiatives, I have asked the CEO of the HSE to now put measures in place to scale-up those initiatives at a national level to address Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy and Speech & Language Therapy waiting lists.

Beginning immediately, I am asking the HSE to reduce the waiting times for these three therapies, to less than 10 months. This will be a massive improvement on where we are now as approximately one third of our patients are currently waiting over a year for a service. This will remove over 60,000 people from the Waiting Lists across these three therapies.

Furthermore, this Government is committed to building capacity in primary care therapy services, outlined in the Programme for Government by recruiting and retaining additional staff numbers, promoting advanced practice roles for health and social care professionals, and increasing the number of college places for health and social care professions.

Taken together these effort will address the waiting lists for primary care therapies in both the short and medium-term.