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

I agree. As I said, we have 181 primary care centres, with eight under construction and 20 more at early planning stages for precisely that.
Regarding the Deputy's constituent who could not get surgery, let us count up the different things we have said here.
It was said that they cannot get theatre time for her. There is a theatre utilisation project. I would very much like to know the nature of her procedure and to test this case against theatre utilisation across the hospital. The Deputy says that we need a new hospital. I remind him that we are building both a surgical hub and an elective hospital precisely to provide additional theatre time. Let us stay aligned to exactly what is going on, which is the delivery of full utilisation of all of the theatres in University Hospital Galway, a surgical hub and an elective hospital. Can the Deputy imagine the number of surgeons it takes to run those all of the time? If we are to run them seven days a week, how many surgeons would it take? How many surgeons does it take to run a surgical hub all of the time, recognising that they will not all be working all of the time and that there will be two or three shifts? How many are required to run an elective hospital and all of the theatres that are already in UHG? How many surgeons does all of that take? I strongly recommend to the members of the Committee on Health who are here that they should invite the team that has done the theatre utilisation project and the OPD toolkit before the committee and interrogate them as to their findings and the use of theatres so that they can see this for themselves. We can then come back and seriously look at the number of surgeons it takes to fill six surgical hubs, four elective hospitals and every theatre in the country.
When we were doing the urgent project to deliver more endometriosis surgeries, I was looking for an additional 100 surgeries in the final quarter of 2025. One of the responses I got from a surgeon, who really is invested in this and who really is working hard, is that one of the barriers was that he had been told elective work could not be done after 5 p.m. in the theatres in the maternity hospital he was working in. I said "I am sorry, what? Says who?" These are some of the barriers we have to overcome. We have a lot of space. We have to use 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