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

I have a case involving a patient who has critical ischemia of her leg. She is a hard-working woman in her 60s. Twice she has had to be admitted to hospital and twice she has been sent out. She needs a procedure done. She has now been sitting for two weeks in a bed in UHG because they cannot get theatre time to do the procedure she requires. That is simply not a productive system. We have people who have given up on certain specialties, such as dermatology, rheumatology and others, in the west because they cannot get access. I completely agree with the Minister and she has my full support for any productivity reforms.
We also need to deal with the fact that our health service has not been digitalised. We are off the record. The EU 2030 Digital Compass requires that patients will have fully digitalised records in every country in the European Union. Ireland is so far off that chart. Countries like Estonia, Malta and Lithuania can do this, and we cannot. We need to focus on enabling productivity.
The Minister is right that we should be using our physical resources insofar as we can. However, there is an issue with UHG, and we need a new hospital there over the next ten years in order to make sure it functions properly as a level 4 hospital. That is the type of specialty treatment that some people need but they are competing with people who go through the emergency room, elderly people who need care in the hospital setting and people who might be better cared for in a community setting. We have to deal with primary care. We need to get over the culture that because it is a contract-led service by GPs, the infrastructure should be borne only by GPs. If we are completely serious, we should be building State-led primary care centres and have five-year, rent-free zones to attract young GPs into those centres.

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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