Hospital Waiting Lists

 I agree it is a real problem that there are long waiting lists and large numbers of patients on trolleys. While this is not acceptable to any of us, it is nothing new. For most of the time I have spent in this House, unimaginable funds were available and were indeed spent on health by the Government of the day. Despite this, waiting lists continued to grow and overcrowded emergency departments were a recurring feature. Governments across Europe are trying to play catch-up with the increasing demands on their health services as better and more expensive medicines, more sophisticated procedures and more expensive devices become available. Of course we have ageing populations. It was nigh on impossible to deal with this trend during the depths of the recession, but we now have a range of targeted initiatives, some of which are financial. I hope the incentives for consultants and nurses, for example, will begin to have an impact shortly.

 We are taking measures to ensure our acute hospitals are used as acute hospitals that deal with major trauma and complex cases. This is the purpose for which they were intended. Despite the considerable publicity around this issue, I believe there continues to be a great deal of inappropriate use of emergency departments. I know that people in my constituency use their general practitioners during surgery hours. At weekends, they will go to private clinics if they have money. Otherwise they will go to St. Vincent’s Hospital even though that is not appropriate in many cases. At the other end of the stay in hospital, there has been considerable investment in reducing delayed discharges. This is being done by funding the fair deal, increasing the funding of home care packages and investing in step-down facilities such as the 65-bed hospital that opened in my constituency recently. I was horrified to read recently that some patients who were about to be discharged from Beaumont Hospital – they were ready for discharge – refused to cross the Liffey, as if Churchtown was some sort of offshore island or something. I really think that kind of choice should not be made available to families. They should be allowed to choose between step-down facilities, but they should not have a choice between an acute hospital and a step-down facility.

 I think the overall message for health service improvements and for better patient outcomes, in the context of the ever-increasing and expanding demand for health services, is partly about funding, but it is also about using our resources so we get a better bang for our buck and implementing the kind of change about which Deputy Buttimer and the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, have spoken.