Hospital Waiting Lists
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I agree. That is what we are trying to do. On the primary care centres, we have 181 at the moment, with eight under construction and 21 more in early planning stages. However, if people do not use them and if they are not used for outpatient procedures to relieve pressures on hospitals, we are going to keep having the same conversation. There is an excellent outpatient centre in Merlin Park right beside UHG. It is one of the few that is being used on a three-session per day basis. Good work has been done in that primary care centre but a lot more can be done.
This is as much about how people are working as about where they are working. I have talked about the physical capacity increases that we have but we cannot keep building more physical capacity if people are not going to use it differently. There is no point in concentrating consultant work between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday to Friday with all of this additional capacity. I would rather spend money hiring more people to fill the spare space. However, how can we be sure that will happen if the clinical leadership does not make sure we are implementing the contract such as it is? We have to see evidence of that and the trajectory in relation to it.
I agree with the Deputy on all the fantastic people doing fantastic work but we cannot keep saying that in the knowledge that many of them also have to work differently to make sure we are using the space that we have all paid for by making it available for the benefit of patients. We cannot have primary care centres closing at 5 p.m. They have to be open and serving the community until 8 p.m. or 10 p.m. That is what they are for. This is about building capacity, as it always will be with a growing population, but at some point we will reach a juncture where we have built so much capacity and if we have all of this evidence of it not being used or not being used in the most balanced way across the week, we will have to start asking ourselves decent questions about it.

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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