Well said.

As the Deputy is aware, we are not in a position where we can say that management says its staff needs a pay rise therefore we simply take that out of the national pay agreements and give them the pay rise. The Deputy's party is signed up to it as is Government and these kind of issues are public sector pay issues, which need to form part of broader discussions in terms of public sector pay. The Minister for Finance, Deputy McGrath, and the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Ref…

I take the point made by the Deputy. We must treat the two issues in parallel. Regardless of the efforts made, or the success or failure in any specific nursing home, we must still ensure that State funding is going to these homes to protect the residents. In parallel to this, we must take the patient safety and regulatory issues very seriously. To that effect, just last night, the Patient Safety (Notifiable Incidents and Open Disclosure) Bill 2019 finished its passage through the Houses. It is going to the Preside…

There are two more Wicklow Deputies to speak. I warmly welcome the opportunity to discuss the upcoming surrogacy legislation following the work of the Special Oireachtas Joint Committee on International Surrogacy. I acknowledge the enormous efforts over many years of many advocates and the surrogacy groups, some of whom are with us today in the Visitors Gallery. They are all very welcome. It has been my great honour and pleasure to meet with parents and their beautiful children as well as many others who want nothi…

We are awaiting final advice from the Attorney General. That is what I am trying to get.

This is an entirely technical amendment to delete the phrase "Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform" and replace it with "Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform". The amendment is required by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, OPC.

I thank my colleagues across the Dáil and the Seanad for the speedy passage of the Bill through Committee and Remaining Stages. We all know how important the Bill is and what it will do for patients. It will provide mandatory open disclosure of serious patient safety incidences. It provides for notification to the regulator. It extends HIQA's remit to private hospitals, which is very important. It contains provisions supporting clinical audit, something we need to have go from strength to strength. As regards the s…

I have had several conversations with the team at Wexford General Hospital, Government colleagues and the Deputy about the need for the block. It is a project that I support. The capital plan will be published soon. This will contain details of bed projects across the country. We will wait for that for the details.

To date, €208 million in tax-free payments has been distributed. That gets lost sometimes when there is an ever-decreasing number of people who have not been paid and who, quite rightly, are looking to be paid. At this point the vast majority - over 90% - of the organisations that have submitted claims to the HSE have been engaged with. There were issues with compliance and the submissions. The HSE was working with the organisations to resolve those issues. The vast majority of those organisations now either have b…

If there are specific service-level issues such as those the Deputy has raised, he might send me a note and I will get him a response. The Deputy will be aware that we are investing in stroke care. We have rolled out the first national stroke strategy this year. There is a lot more money going in, both in terms of the acute services and the very quick responses, which are making a huge difference to patients' recovery, and also in community rehab including neurorehabilitation teams. It is growing but if there are s…

I thank the Deputy for the question. As we are all aware, universal healthcare is something we are all signed up to through Sláintecare and are committed to very strongly in the programme for Government, and this is a core element of that. One of the three tests of universal healthcare is that care is either free or affordable for everybody who needs to use it. As the Deputy and colleagues will be aware, it is my intention to expand eligibility by approximately 500,000 GP cards, which is a substantial increase. The…

I thank the Deputy for his reply and I do not disagree with his analysis at all. It is frustrating to me that we did not bring it in this month. The Deputy is absolutely correct in that this was the plan and that was what we budgeted for and what we wanted to achieve. The GP community asked us to wait and the choice was to proceed, which we could have done in spite of that, or to give the process a bit more time out of respect for general practice to ensure that we get it right. I would have much preferred to have …

Yes, it will. The Deputy will be aware that we are kicking off a strategic review of GP practice. It is based on a report that was published not long ago on the future of general practice. We accept that report. A team is being put in place now and I have appointed three GPs to the team to ensure that the voice of the doctor is very much front and centre on that. Essentially, the process is that we have 500,000 cards to bring in this year. That comprises approximately 70,000 cards to cover six- and seven-year-olds …

I thank the Deputy for the question. The answer is "Yes, very shortly". As he will be aware, the review of the operation of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act commenced in line with statutory commitments in December 2021, a bit over a year ago. The purpose of the review was to assess the effectiveness of the operation of the Act. It comprised two phases. The first was an exercise to gather evidence and information. This consisted of public consultation and a review of the operation of the Act f…

The report will be available to the Government and then to everybody else very shortly. It is a good report and it is very detailed. It is a very useful report. It has identified various things that work well and various things that we need to improve at an operational level. There are also some legislative recommendations in it. I have no doubt but that the health committee will take time to consider it. Then we will have a quite lively, and hopefully respectful, debate. My driving concern relates to patient care …

I am prohibited from giving the Deputy an exact date; suffice it to say that it will be made available very shortly. He can read into that what he wants.

The Deputy can read into that what he wants. It will be made available very shortly. Let us wait until we have the report before we get into operational and legislative recommendations. Regardless of the report, which is a good one, the core focus for me and the HSE concerning the provision of services is increasing the number of maternity hospitals that are providing services. That only 11 of our 19 maternity hospitals are currently providing services is totally and utterly unacceptable. Therefore, I am working ve…

The short answer is "Yes, and a consolidated plan". I fully agree. The Deputy and I have discussed this several times. We already have several multi-annual plans in place. The core infrastructural plan is the 2018 capacity review, which gives us targets, agreed by everyone in the House, for acute beds, critical care beds, nursing home beds, elective capacity and so forth. We are reviewing the 2018 capacity review. It probably underestimates fairly significantly the number needed. The report gives us a range of acut…

I agree with all that. We have a beds plan and a hospital building plan so the multi-annual bits and pieces are in place, and we also have the community care plan. The enhanced community care programme is the multi-annual plan and is really going from strength to strength. I am opening another three primary care centres tomorrow. That is going really well. We have community care, beds and hospitals. Diagnostics is going very well. The GP access to diagnostics programme did more than a quarter of a million scans las…

Between the Deputy and the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Waterford is well represented in Dáil Éireann. It is also well represented in Seanad Éireann. Let us not lose sight of the fact that over the past three years, we have seen an historic expansion of capacity. More beds have been added than at any time in a very long time, there has been more access to diagnostics than in a very long time and more new hospitals signed off than in God knows how long. We are up to nearly 20,000 additional whole-t…