Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 8 December 2022
16. Deputy Aindrias Moynihan asked the Minister for Health if his attention has been drawn to the delays for persons accessing and securing appointments in high street opticians for routine eye tests and eye care; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [61365/22]
View answerWith many opticians, you can expect to wait from three to five weeks to get an appointment for an eye test. I have raised this with a number of opticians locally and across the area. They are struggling to get enough optometrists; as a result, people have to wait longer to get a service. Has the Minister's attention been drawn to it? Is there a way of improving those wait times for people?
I thank the Deputy for raising the issue. The HSE provides routine eye examinations and glasses for people with medical cards under the community ophthalmic services scheme. The Deputy is talking about the medical card scheme rather than private provision.
Private and public.
Both. Okay, thank you. With regard to the medical card, the service is provided by optical practitioners who are contracted by the HSE. This allows people the freedom to choose a practice and time that is most suitable for them. Timely access to services is an important part of maintaining good optical health. While the schedules of private practices are beyond the remit of the HSE, the HSE does process the applications for reimbursement. The HSE has advised that while most applications are processed in five to ten days, some community healthcare organisations, CHOs, as the Deputy pointed out, have encountered difficulties this year. Delays arose in CHO 9 due to staff shortages caused by Covid-19 redeployment. This has now been resolved and processing time is within five days.
The Deputy's question is relevant to processing but is really about patient access to optometrists. For that, we need to hire more staff and have more people available. The number of new optometrists graduating in Ireland has remained steady since 2019. We need to double the number of healthcare professional college places in the country. I have met with various universities to this end. We will feed this in to structurally address the question of whether we have enough graduates coming out in this area.
Many people use private operators, that is, the optician on the high street. They serve the public with the PRSI scheme and so on. They struggle to get staff. Across Cork a half dozen optometrist posts are currently advertised and, for as many again, the advertisement has been taken down because they have not been able to recruit anybody. Locum cover is extremely difficult to get.
Fewer than 30 people graduate from the one course each year. Very often, they are in direct competition with the UK for those people, so the pool of qualified people is very small each year. It is good to hear the Minister has been making inquiries about qualifying more people. Will he elaborate on that? We need to see more people being qualified and available to serve people in the community.
There are two things. The Deputy's numbers may be correct. The information I received from the Department is that about 20 graduate per year.
One thing that will help is that it is proposed that the standard eye exam fee will increase for medical card holders. That will mean more money will come into the practices and they may be able to offer more attractive salaries. The issue is structural; it is not a short-term issue.
I want to see a doubling of college places for healthcare professionals. We are approaching it strategically and have been doing a lot of work in the background to figure out how many extra nurses, midwives and health and social care professionals we need across the board. I have engaged directly with some universities to gauge their appetite for a big expansion of health places. They have been very open to it. I met the excellent team in University College Cork, UCC, and it was a very positive meeting. Ultimately, we will solve these issues in the long term by providing about twice the number of healthcare graduates we currently do.
The need is there and is growing. On top of driver licence applications, there are people with more complex conditions. The pandemic saw people having more screen time and that will have a knock-on effect. Demand is growing each year. There is only a very small pool qualifying from that one course. It takes up to four years to qualify so there is a greater urgency there.
Is there a college that will start a course in the short term so that, in four or five years time, we could expect to see further growth? Opticians are struggling to recruit. The need is there from the public so we cannot wait for the colleges. People need to be doing the course already if it takes four years to qualify a person. Is there a way to get those courses started in the colleges?
I believe there is.
The health and social care professional field is a diverse group of professionals in skills and training. As the Deputy said, we are not talking about a lot. We have 20 graduates a year and we probably need 40 a year, given the scale of what we are looking at. We are looking at nursing places moving from 2,000 to 4,000. The scale of the move from 20 to 40 should be able to be facilitated quickly. In the meantime, private practices will just have to look at international markets to see what they can do. However, I acknowledge that it is not easy.
