Hospital Waiting Lists
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Martin Daly (FF), Roscommon-Galway

There are brilliant people working in the public health service who do their work very well but we can acknowledge, and I think the Minister acknowledges, that there are some hospitals in areas of the country where that productivity is not apparent. I will speak about the HSE West and North West region. In the past, at the health committee, the Minister acknowledged there are issues around discharge and management of patient flows. The west and north west is the poorest region of the country, with the highest proportion of the population in receipt of disability payments and the highest proportion of the population in receipt of a full medical card. We have a situation where we cannot discharge patients from a level 4 hospital, namely, UHG because there are not any step-down beds and not enough rehabilitation beds or enough home-help hours. In addition, we have a level 4 hospital that is purporting to carry out all the services of a level 4 hospital without having that capacity. We need a commitment to a new hospital in the west, at UHG in Galway.
In addition, we have a situation where there has been an over-reliance on the private developer-delivered primary care centres and also an over-reliance on individual GPs to deliver that infrastructure. If we are completely serious about the interconnectivity of our health service, we need to get some of that investment into primary care. The vast majority of the very considerable investment by the State over the last five years has continued to go into hospital care and acute care and not enough has gone into developing primary care. We have the longest waiting lists for speech therapy, psychology, community physiotherapy and speech and language therapy in the community. Unless we fix that capacity in the community in tandem with the acute service, we will not see the end of these waiting lists.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21