Health Services
Seanad Éireann — 2025-11-04
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Robert Troy (FF), Longford-Westmeath

I thank Senator Kyne for raising this issue on behalf of his constituent's family. I am taking this Commencement matter on behalf of my colleague, the Minister for Health, Deputy Carroll MacNeill. Primary care therapy services such a speech and language therapy play a central role in the provision of early and cost-effective interventions. However, the HSE has advised that primary care therapy services such as speech and language therapy are experiencing increased pressure due to an increase in referrals, alongside increasing complexity of presentations which is leading to longer interventions, as well as challenges related to recruitment and retention of healthcare professionals working in general and specialist services in the community. Taken together, these factors have all contributed to an increase in waiting lists and waiting times for services across the country. Specifically, in Galway, the HSE advises that there have been challenges filling a number of maternity leave vacancies. A local recruitment campaign was carried out recently and a senior speech and language therapist panel was formed in order to address these vacancies. In addition, the HSE is managing vacancies locally through use of agency staff and ensuring that a service is provided to the highest priority children.
The Minister fully acknowledges the urgent need to improve timely access to services and consistency of patient experience, regardless of location, for all primary care therapy services, including speech and language therapy. To address long waiting times, the Department of Health and HSE have jointly developed a focused programme approach to put in place considerable standardised infrastructure to support systematic responses to primary care therapy waiting lists. As part of this programme approach and building on successful local initiatives focused on reducing primary care waiting lists, the Minister has asked the CEO of the HSE to put measures in place to scale up these initiatives at a national level to address three primary care services, specifically speech and language therapy, physiotherapy and occupational therapy. Beginning immediately, the HSE has been asked to reduce the waiting lists for these three therapies to less than ten months. Nationally, this will remove over 60,000 people from the waiting lists across these three primary care therapies. There will be a significant improvement on where we are now, as approximately one third of our patients are currently waiting over a year to access services. The Government has provided initial funding to the HSE to begin this work.
The Minister fully recognises the frustration of people in parts of Galway with long waiting times for speech and language therapy services. She also recognises that much more needs to be done to fill local vacancies, address waiting lists and ensure consistent, equitable and timely access to primary care services across communities. This Government is committed to building capacity in primary care, as outlined in the programme for Government, by recruiting additional staff numbers, promoting advanced practice roles in the community for health and social care professionals and increasing the number of college training places for health and social care professions. Together, these measures to reduce therapy waiting times to 12 months nationally, and to build capacity in our healthcare workforce, will bring about improvements in access to services across the country, including in Connemara.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-11-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:16+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-04