Primary Care Services Dail Éireann — 2024-05-22 ============================================================ James O'Connor (FF), Cork East I thank the Minister of State for being here this morning. I wish to raise the issue of speech and language services that is affecting the east Cork area. We have wonderful healthcare professionals working across the healthcare service in County Cork and Cork city and in other services in west Waterford which are used by people in my constituency. However, we have problems around resourcing. Unfortunately, one of these areas is speech and language therapy. Speech and language therapy is of huge importance to younger children in particular going through education who need that assistance to deal with issues with speaking, other communication aspects and swallowing. It is an important service for those people who need it, especially children in education. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is that there is a recommended timeline of approximately 16 weeks for assessment periods in the public system. What is happening in my neck of the woods, which is only a short spin from where the Minister of State is based, is that waiting times are extending to in excess of 30 weeks. We had a brilliant person in Youghal. Everyone was very fond of the individual who worked in Youghal but that role has now been vacated. Youghal town on the east periphery of Cork now has an empty role because of the HSE embargo. I am sure we will hear something about that this morning. That role is now empty and those cases are being pushed on to Midleton. Midleton was already under significant strain. The workload allocation in the Midleton area has taken on a day’s worth of Youghal cases despite the fact there was already a backlog in this area. I am asking that we look at, resource and try to deal with this going forward. Only a small number of individuals can fix this problem. There is an immediacy around the fact the embargo is having serious impacts, particularly in rural healthcare settings. The whole point of the primary care model was about providing that care within communities. Youghal, as the Minister of State knows, is earmarked for a new primary care centre. The planning has been submitted for this. It is being developed through the private model with the HSE and it is a good thing. People wanted it locally. It was signed off on in recent years under the new HSE capital development plan. However, I am not going to wait for that for this issue to be solved. I want it done now. The embargo needs to be lifted and it needs to be borne in mind that, prior to the embargo, parents with children due to get those assessments were not waiting around the 16-week timeline but were up at more than 30 weeks. For anyone in east Cork who needs these services, this is intolerable and the impact this has on the children and their development, education and other aspects of their livelihoods is something that goes under the radar as an issue versus other healthcare issues. I know we have a new Minister of State in place and it is very welcome to see him here this morning. He represents the neighbouring constituency to my own in Cork North-Central. For the people of Cork East, this is an issue and I would appreciate it if the Minister of State would take it back to the Department of Health and explain that the embargo is madness and that this role in Youghal has to be occupied. In addition to that role in Youghal being occupied when it is, we have to look at dealing with that backlog of cases. They are far above what is acceptable for those who need access urgently to those services in the public system. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-05-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-05-22