Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 13 July 2022
512. Deputy Duncan Smith asked the Minister for Health the projected full-year costs of the free contraception scheme for women aged 17 to 25 years in 2023; if funding is already in place for 2023; the estimated amount that it would cost to extend the scheme up to women aged 45 years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [38334/22]
View answerThe Programme for Government, 2020 commits to providing free contraception for women, starting with the 17-25 age cohort. My Department's Contraception Implementation Group, convened in July, 2021, has been working with partners, including the HSE, towards ensuring that the scheme will commence in late August, or early September 2022. Funding of approximately €9m has been allocated for this in Budget 2022.The scheme will be open to all 17-25 year-old women ordinarily resident in Ireland and will provide for:
The cost of prescription contraception;
The cost of necessary consultations with medical professionals to discuss suitable contraception options with individual patients and to enable prescription of same;
The cost of fitting and/or removal of various types of long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) plus any necessary checks, by medical professionals certified to fit/remove same;
The cost of training and certifying additional medical professionals to fit and remove LARCs;
The cost of providing the wide range of contraceptive options currently available to GMS (medical) card holders, which will also be available through this scheme, including contraceptive injections, implants, IUS and IUDs (coils), the contraceptive patch and ring, and various forms of oral contraceptive pill, including emergency contraception.
Full year costings for 17-25 year-olds will be considered in the context of Estimates 2023 and are estimated at €26m. However, no costings have been finalised to date and no funding allocations for future years agreed at this stage. Estimated costings for wider age ranges have been included in the Report of the Working Group on Contraception, which is available on the Department’s website.
The design of citizen engagement information and publicity campaigns to support and promote the roll out of the scheme will be finalised in the coming weeks by officials in the Department’s Press and Communications Team, the HSE’s Communications team and relevant subject matter experts.
Formal consultations with medical representative bodies with regard to service provision under the scheme have commenced and are ongoing. The legal framework for the scheme will be provided by the Health (Miscellaneous Provisions) (No. 2) Bill, 2022. The Bill has now passed all stages in the Oireachtas .
