I can provide the Deputy with information to the end of quarter 3. Unfortunately, Fórsa workers are refusing to provide information to the HSE, the Department and Parliament. This does not fall within a work-to-rule action, and I have clear advice on that. Nonetheless, that is what they are doing and we have to deal with it. I acknowledge the distress this has caused to patients and families. I have been in the position, as have many others, I am sure, where a family member or friend has been waiting for a procedur…

There are a few things to unpick there, the first of which is around waiting times for inpatient and day-case patients. There is good news in that regard. The Deputy will have seen the releases in recent weeks. We have looked at 2023. Thanks to an enormous effort by healthcare workers across the country, the waiting time versus the Covid peak for someone waiting the longest - over 12 months - has fallen by nearly half. We will continue to make progress. Great efforts have been made in every hospital to make that ha…

There have been some important changes. I brought this matter to the Ministers, Deputies McGrath and Donohoe, some time ago in regard to major capital projects in healthcare. There have been some important changes and I will mention two in particular. First, the major capital ceiling was increased by €100 million to €200 million and, second, the four-stage process was reduced to two stages and is now moving quicker. I do not disagree with the Deputy's comments, not so much in terms of the Department of Public Expen…

We will then have them in Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway. They will make a big difference to the national inpatient day-case lists.

I do not think that dig is fair. I respectfully disagree with the Deputy on that. I am happy to meet the stakeholders. I have met TENI and other groups before and I am happy to meet them. I am meeting a constituent of mine soon who was in contact. She is the parent of a transgender child who wants to talk through some of the issues that they are facing, which I am familiar with and I am very sympathetic to. I am committed to the development of a model of care that delivers proper services for this group of people. …

It is disappointing but very useful to hear that feedback. On the back of this discussion, I will talk to the Department and the HSE. Of course, I can meet the groups and am happy to do so again but ultimately they need to be talking to the people who are designing the model of care. Of course, it can be useful to talk to a Minister but really, they need direct input into the model of care that is being developed. I am happy to say that we have allocated funding for this year, a sum of €100,000, for the establishme…

I take that feedback very seriously. We cannot have a situation where we are developing a model of care for a group of people who are not involved and whose voices are not heard. We are trying, although it does not always work and we are not always successful, to move to a situation where the patient voice is front and centre in everything we do. We are embedding it in legislation in the Patient Safety (Notifiable Incidents and Open Disclosure) Act and through new regulations within the HSE. We are not getting it r…

I thank Deputy Tully for her question and assure her that I am fully committed to the development of Cavan General Hospital and to all of our regional hospitals right across the country. When I received the Deputy's question I asked for a note on the recent investment in Cavan hospital. It is all well and good with me saying what might happen in the future but I wanted to establish that real investment has been happening over the last few years and I have to say, the response is very encouraging. The budget in the …

With regard to emergency departments, I am sorry I do not have the figures for Cavan. However, last year we moved to an all-year-round approach to urgent and emergency care to get away from this annual cycle of winter plans. To the great credit of our healthcare professionals, we have seen a very important reduction. I am not for a moment diminishing the fact that the numbers are still way too high and some emergency departments in some hospitals are under huge pressure. Approximately seven hospitals account for ab…

I am obviously not familiar with the case but it does not sound right. We are in the middle of a very fundamental shift in healthcare provision in respect of exactly the situation that woman found herself in. We are moving from a five-day week service to a seven-day week hospital service. Of course, hospitals are open at the weekends but, exactly to the Deputy's point, all the services are not always available at weekends. The new consultant contract is part of that, as is the hiring of 25,000 more staff. It takes …

I thank the Deputy for the question. I heard this morning that AI is front and centre at Davos as well. It is certainly coming to the fore very rapidly. It will have potentially radical benefits, be they in diagnostics, in some advanced care, or robotics for procedures, and as we move forward with genetics, genomics and genome sequencing. AI will move more and more to the fore. What is critical for Ireland is for us to make sure that we capture these benefits for patients. We must have state-of-the-art e-health and…

It is such a good question. There are many parts to this. One is general cybersecurity. It can be imagined, following the cyber breach we had, there has been very significant investment in and strengthening of cybersecurity across our health services. There are many subtleties to AI, for example, ethical AI. We would be handing over some form of advisory capacity, decision-making capacity, or whatever it might be, to algorithms. There has to be appropriate oversight of that. Not only that, there has to be appropria…

It is an ongoing process and it is a rapidly emerging field. There are areas we are looking at very closely such as cybersecurity, as we discussed, ethical AI and the guidelines on the use of that, patient consent, and full information on how information may be used. We can do population-based analyses with or without AI. Having that population-based information will be invaluable for public health responses and investment in public health. There is no doubt AI can enhance that. There also would be AI applications …

I thank Deputy Tóibín for the question. We must endeavour to do everything we can to make sure the responses are properly triaged and then the response times are such that where they really do need to be there very quickly this is achieved. I acknowledge the commitment of the National Ambulance Service and all of those working in it to deliver this on behalf of patients. We have invested more than €219 million in the National Ambulance Service since 2019. It represents a €50 million increase. It is has been a very …

Neither I, the Deputy nor those working in our ambulance service would stand over or defend those individual cases where people clearly have waited far too long. Nobody would defend that. On the response times, the core targets the service works to are the ECHO and the DELTA times. They were very close to those times last year. I hear the Deputy's point about going back to the 2015 figures. This is why I wanted to give the Deputy just last year's figures. Of the 600 new staff, 228 of them were just last year. I und…

I certainly know the ambulance service can take that under advisement and will do everything it can to increase the turnaround times. It has been innovating over the past few years. The clinical hub now has hear and treat and see and treat services they did not have previously. The Deputy will be aware of the pathfinder model, the medical assessment unit pathways, the community paramedic scheme, the ED in the home and various other issues. The ambulance services are to be commended for their innovation. I am not de…

I thank the Deputy for tabling this question. The National Cancer Registry Ireland reported that about one quarter of all cancers diagnosed between 2019 and 2021 were non-melanoma skin cancers. Melanoma of skin accounted for one in 20 of the remaining invasive cancers diagnosed and one in 50 of cancer deaths every year. It is very important that anyone who has any concern should contact their GP. I am engaged directly with the dermatology services, which are a critical part of this, as are oncology services, to mak…

I thank Deputy Funchion. It is something on which, between the legislation we have and the EU's ongoing work, we can go further. As I said, one in every four diagnosed cancers is a non-melanoma skin cancer. It is a significant issue. When I was a much younger man with a full head of hair I went to Australia and lived in Bondi Beach. There was a level of awareness there about skin cancer that did not exist in Ireland. To this day we do not have the level of awareness they had 28 years ago when I was there. More can …

I thank the Deputy. With regard to the EU's recommendations we need to wait to see. However, the general sense is that it is considering restricting access for high-risk groups, the mandatory supervision of the commercial use of sunbeds, the provision of mandatory eye protection, and increasing awareness by providing information on the risks associated. I have asked the Chief Medical Officer and her team to engage in a new public health strategy, including prevention. This would be one of the parts of this. There i…

I thank the Deputy for the question. We spend a lot of money on medicines in this country. Last year the medicines investment was more than €3.2 billion. This is a sizeable amount. The vast majority of the €2.8 billion was spent on the medicines themselves. There was also money spent on administration and payments to pharmacists for dispensing amounting to just over €400 million. Our public spend on medicines is, believe it or not, €1 in every €8 that we spend on healthcare. There is an unprecedented level of inves…