This week I received government approval for the legal framework that will allow the new National Maternity Home on the campus of St Vincent’s University Hospital in Elm Park to proceed.
This is an important piece of healthcare infrastructure, ensuring women and young children are cared for in a state-of-the-art hospital. Now, nine years later, we have to go ahead and build it up.
While this debate has rightfully hogged public health discourse for the last few weeks, it is just one important part of a vast reform program taking place across our health care system.
This year, healthcare will receive net funding of €21.7 billion – €6 billion more than in 2018. We’re investing in more beds, equipment and technology, reforming clinical pathways and providing more care in the home and in the community.
Real progress is being made. Since 2020 we have opened another 850 hospital beds.
We have 14,000 more staff in HSE than at the start of 2020 – 4,000 more nurses and midwives, 2,200 health and social workers, 1,300 doctors and dentists and 2,500 in inpatient and patient care.
Despite progress, too many people have waited far too long for care and Covid has made it worse. I am determined to cut waiting lists once and for all.
Hundreds of thousands of people are on waiting lists. I know that these long waits cause tremendous stress, pain and discomfort. They must be a thing of the past once and for all.
At the end of last year we had 75,000 patients on waiting lists of active hospitals (inpatient and outpatient).
Almost all of these patients will be treated by the end of the year, bringing the number of patients on active waitlists to its lowest level in five years.
We will ensure treatment is offered to patients waiting longer than six months on inpatient or outpatient waiting lists for 15 specific high-volume procedures.
More than 1.5 million patients will be added to active waitlists this year. Our 2022 waiting list plan describes how an even larger number, 1.7 million, will be treated and removed from the lists.
We need to build more beds, reform our service delivery, digitize our healthcare service, and hire more staff to ensure there are no backlogs and delays in our public health service.
Greater access along with affordability and improved quality are my healthcare priorities – and are indeed outlined in Sláintecare’s vision.
Last month I received the green light from the Cabinet to abolish inpatient hospital fees for children under 16. We plan to eliminate these fees this summer, an important step towards universal health coverage.
Currently, families and guardians can be charged €80 per night up to a maximum of €800 per year in a public hospital.
It is a lot of money. I want to go further. We are actively considering eliminating hospital fees for all public patients seeking inpatient care at our public hospitals.
For far too long, access to care and health has been hampered by the ability to pay. I believe healthcare services should be affordable or free at the point of delivery.
This year we have already lowered the cap on the drug payment system from €144 per month last year to €80 today – a savings of €768 per year for families coping with long-term or chronic illnesses. We plan to extend free GP care to six and seven year olds later this year.
In August, we will offer free contraception to women aged 17-25 as the first step towards free contraception for everyone.
One area that tends to receive less attention in our national discussion is clinical quality and patient outcomes.
While services can often take far too long to access, once you’re in the system, care keeps improving. We can see this clearly when it comes to stroke and cancer survival rates.
An example of the progress we are making in terms of quality is the implementation of our women’s health plan, an area that has never received the required level of investment.
We now have earmarked budgets for women’s health care.
And we will now build a world-class national maternity hospital to serve the women of Ireland.
Our goal is to offer one of the best healthcare services in the world.
Our nation must be one where everyone has access to excellent health care when they need it.
The progress made over the last few years, the exceptional efforts of our healthcare workers during Covid and the approach we are taking to investing, building and modernizing means we are on track to achieve this goal.
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/new-nmh-just-one-step-on-governments-path-to-creating-state-of-the-art-world-class-health-service-41672917.html The new LMWH is just one step in the government’s journey to create a state-of-the-art, world-class healthcare service
