Peadar Tóibín
Ceist:1. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [44624/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraWednesday, 5 October 2022
Ceisteanna (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
Gino Kenny
Ceist:2. Deputy Gino Kenny asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [44844/22]
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Mary Lou McDonald
Ceist:3. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [45435/22]
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Ivana Bacik
Ceist:4. Deputy Ivana Bacik asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [45730/22]
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Aindrias Moynihan
Ceist:5. Deputy Aindrias Moynihan asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [48121/22]
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John Lahart
Ceist:6. Deputy John Lahart asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [48122/22]
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Richard Boyd Barrett
Ceist:7. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [48748/22]
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Paul Murphy
Ceist:8. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on health will next meet. [48749/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraFreagraí ó Béal (13 píosaí cainte)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 to 8, inclusive, together.
The Cabinet committee on health oversees implementation of programme for Government commitments relating to health, receives detailed reports on identified policy areas and considers the implementation of health reforms, including Sláintecare. The Cabinet committee last met on Thursday, 9 June, and is expected to meet again shortly. In addition to the meetings of the full Cabinet and of Cabinet committees, I meet with Ministers on an individual basis to focus on different issues. I meet regularly with the Minister for Health to discuss priorities in the area of health, including Sláintecare.
A number of priority programmes and reforms under Sláintecare have continued to be advanced to provide people with the right care in the right place at the right time. Work is progressing on the establishment of six new regional health areas and on the elective care centres in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The enhanced community care programme also continues to develop healthcare at a more local level closer to where people live, reducing pressure on hospital services. I have seen the enhanced community care programme in operation and it is a significant advancement on what was there previously.
Last week, the Government announced investment of €23.4 billion in our health and social care services. This represents the highest allocation of funding to the sector in the history of the State. It is designed to facilitate better access to affordable and high-quality healthcare during the current cost-of-living crisis and further advance our ambition for universal healthcare for all. Specifically, €107 million is being allocated to ease cost-of-living pressures. As part of this, eligibility for GP access cards is being extended. By the end of 2022, it is intended the scheme will cover all children aged six and seven. From 1 April 2023, it will be extended to people who earn the median household income of €46,000 or less. This measure alone will positively impact 500,000 people. Following the recent abolition of overnight and day case public inpatient charges for children under 16 years of age in all public hospitals, all inpatient hospital charges will be abolished from 1 April 2023. Additional measures include: €10 million for access to IVF treatments; the expansion of the entitlement to free contraception to women aged 26 to 30, and to 16-year-olds, subject to legal advice and consultation; and €5 million to introduce free oral healthcare for children up to seven years of age.
Essential services and service providers will also be financially supported this winter. Section 39 organisations, nursing homes and hospices will be eligible to receive additional support through a once-off health sector fund of €100 million. Access to care is being further prioritised with capacity commitments in the form of increasing staffing levels, delivering 250 new acute, critical care and community beds and a €443 million package to reduce waiting lists. Major increases in mental health services will be implemented, support for older people with a range of needs will be extended and nearly €30 million in new funding has been allocated for expanded disability services.
In the immediate term, the Department of Health and the HSE are at an advanced stage of planning for winter 2022-23. This includes rolling out the 2022-23 influenza campaign, which commenced this week, and making every effort to reduce any potential impact Covid-19 may have.
There are several speakers to come in, so each of them will have one minute.
The sham review into the future of Navan hospital emergency department is now complete. I say it is a sham review for a number of reasons. First, the people carrying out the review were the people who made the original decision. That is never a good way to do a review in Irish democracy. Second, the Minister for Health promised there would be engagement with the local community but there was absolutely none. Third, the Minister of State, Deputy English, promised that a future for Navan emergency department would be included in the review but it simply was not. The review was rushed and there was no consultation whatsoever with the medical staff in Drogheda.
Right now, Navan hospital emergency department has never been as busy. In one day it dealt with 105 patients, 50 of whom would have had to go to Drogheda if the emergency department had closed last June as planned. There were 13 people on trolleys there last week. The hospital has had to reopen wards to fit people in. Is it not the case that the Taoiseach owes the Save Navan Hospital campaign a debt of gratitude for our work in keeping key capacity for the emergency department open during this time of crisis?
Will the Taoiseach guarantee investment in Navan hospital's emergency department into the future?
Recent reports about the delivery of alcohol harm awareness programmes in schools by Drinkaware, an industry-funded organisation, are concerning. This, however, is not a new issue. The Irish Community Action on Alcohol Network, ICAAN, has been raising this issue for years. Research from the Health Research Board, HRB, has found that alcohol-related harm leads to an average of three deaths in the State per day. Why has the Government not fully implemented the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018 on labelling and advertising? Industry-funded bodies like Drinkaware or, in the case of gambling, the Gambling Awareness Trust should never have a place in State education of our children. What actions are to be taken by the Cabinet committee on health to ensure that this does not happen again and that schools have access to education programmes?
I thank the Taoiseach for outlining how the expansion of free GP care is to proceed. Could he confirm if there are any plans by the Government to expand the roll-out of free GP care to those children aged over seven and under 18? We in the Labour Party proposed in our alternative budget that there would be an expansion of free GP care to all those under 18, as originally envisaged. Now, it appears that this Government has abandoned that plan, so the Taoiseach might confirm that, please.
Second, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre is publishing its annual report for 2021 this afternoon. The report will show constant increases in the need for help with more than 14,000 calls last year to the centre. Could the Taoiseach commit to certainty for organisations such as the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, and indeed other rape crisis centres around the country, by providing for multi-annual funding for these organisations that provide critical public services yet are struggling to retain staff and must work year-to-year in relying on Government funding?
Has the Cabinet committee on health discussed the recruitment of people into the health service? There is a very serious situation with more than 20% of posts for care assistants, for example, in the Cork-Kerry region to be filled. Home helps are a vital service in supporting people who want to live at home and in their own communities, and to avoiding people having to go to hospital. The home help service is also a great support for their carers.
This issue has been constantly raised by people in my office. They have been approved home help hours but staff are not available to deliver the service. The HSE has confirmed that there are particular issues locally in Ballincollig, Dunmanway, Macroom and Millstreet where they have struggled to recruit home help workers. This is not exclusively an HSE issue because even private contractors who aim to deliver the service are also struggling. This is also impacting disability services such as the Cope Foundation in Macroom. Has there been any discussion on this topic at this Cabinet committee?
As I raised with the Taoiseach last week, and I want to raise it again because I do not believe I received an accurate answer from him, keeping warm and having heating over the winter is a health issue. Anybody who is on illness benefit, enhanced illness benefit, occupational injuries benefit, maternity benefit or disability benefit, however, does not receive the fuel allowance. Recipients will not, therefore, get the €400 payment, the double payment or the Christmas bonus. What is the Taoiseach going to do for those cohorts of people, many of whom are ill, have hurt themselves at work, are on maternity benefit, or are jobseekers, for that matter, on jobseeker's benefit? They are going to receive none of the one-off assistance payments to deal with the question of being able to heat their homes and pay for the energy price hikes over the winter. The Estimates Book is very clear about this that only people on long-term social welfare payments will receive these payments. Is the Taoiseach going to address that issue?
The Tánaiste told a meeting of the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment this morning that the introduction of statutory sick pay has been delayed by 12 weeks to January 2023. The Covid-19 enhanced illness benefit of €350 was, however, abolished last Friday and is, therefore, back to a payment of €208 a week. Does the Taoiseach agree that the abolition of the Covid-19 enhanced illness benefit should have been delayed until statutory sick pay was ready to be introduced, especially as we are now facing into another wave of Covid-19 and there is a three-month gap between the end of the Covid-19 enhanced illness benefit and the introduction of statutory sick pay?
This will mean that many people will feel forced through economic necessity to go to work while infected with Covid-19 this winter, making the next wave and the impact on hospitals at the busiest time of year much worse than it would otherwise have been. It is the worst type of stupid penny-pinching that will end up creating greater costs for the health service and for people’s health.
Deputy Tóibín was first to speak. In respect of the Navan hospital review, I have not seen it yet so I cannot confirm his perspectives on it as regards his view that it has many shortcomings. I will engage with the Minister for Health on the review. The issues are not simple either. Clinicians on all sides have different perspectives on this in County Meath and elsewhere. We have to ensure that whatever we do is in the best interests of patients in the first instance, and that the best outcomes are achieved in treatment in the right place and at the right time, bearing in mind the severity of a case or of an illness. There is no doubt that hospitals are under a great deal of pressure at the moment because of Covid-19, its aftershocks, and what will be a difficult winter with an anticipated flu and waves of Covid-19. I appeal to people to get vaccinated and to get both the Covid-19 vaccine and the flu vaccine. This is vital in the prevention of getting sick yourself but also of reducing pressures. The Government and the Minister will examine the review that has been undertaken and will engage with the stakeholders on it.
Deputy Gould raised the issue of Drinkaware in our schools. It is not appropriate, as I have said, that resources or materials produced or funded by the drinks industry for education and awareness on alcohol are in use in our schools. The drinks industry should not be near our schools in respect of anything to do with addiction generally. The Departments of Education and Health and the HSE will work together to ensure that this message is communicated clearly to schools. Many of the schools are probably entering into this area in good faith and are anxious to try to help students and young people. I do not think there is any deliberately bad practice here in schools. They want to do the best they can by their students. Of course, the idea of the social, personal and health education, SPHE, programme when it was introduced was to deal with self-esteem, self-respect and addiction issues. There is a specific module within SPHE on the use and misuse of a range of substances. The SPHE specifications are currently being redeveloped by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA. The updated curriculum will be developed for primary, junior and senior cycle. It was published for consultation on 18 July, running until 18 October. Anyone with an interest in the area should contribute to the consultation before the deadline.
The HSE, with the support of the Department of Education and the NCCA, has produced a Healthy Choices resource for junior cycle SPHE, and unit 1 is currently available in the NCCA's online toolkit for SPHE to support teachers in addressing issues of alcohol, tobacco and drug use. The Department and the NCCA will continue to support the HSE in the development of units 2 and 3 of the programme, which are due to be published in 2023.
There are many supports there and materials from Drinkaware or from anywhere else are not needed as resources are already in place and available to schools, and that information will be communicated to them.
There is a Know the Score substance misuse programme published in 2019 for transition and fifth year pupils, which was jointly developed by the HSE, the Department of Education, and the drug and alcohol task forces. Reducing the high levels of harmful patterns of alcohol consumption among young people was one of the primary objectives of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act. We have brought in minimum unit pricing, which I am sure the Deputy agrees with.
We support that.
That is good. There are also a number of other recommendations we are continuing to work on.
Deputy Bacik raised the issue of the expansion of GP care. This year, the Government took the decision to expand quite substantially, through income thresholds, the number of GP care medical cards for access to GPs.
That will be quite substantial, with hundreds of thousands more. We are not abandoning the over-sevens but I believe we have to re-look at how we do it. Invariably, what happens is that an announcement is made in the budget in respect of children, and it then gets into negotiations with the organisations and it is about leveraging funding from the Government. That is not an ideal way of doing it. Income thresholds were an original view within the Department of Health for a long time, but we are not abandoning this. We provided for an extension in legislation for the over-sevens and the Minister will continue to pursue that in the time ahead. The focus and the allocation this year is in respect of the expansion of GP care to those on medium incomes.
The Deputy also raised the issue of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and its multi-annual funding. Again, there should be a base minimum and at least an understanding of a floor below which multi-annual funding does not drop in respect of organisations that are providing an ongoing service, such as those at the rape crisis centres across the country.
Deputy Aindrias Moynihan raised a fair point in respect of the recruitment process. The HSE is saying that over the past two years, certainly since the onset of Covid, approximately 15,000 people have been recruited, which is the largest ever number, but there are issues. In home care, we dramatically increased the number of hours to 20 million and we now want to go to 24 million home care hours, which is dramatic compared to where it was two years ago, and that has put a strain on the attempt to get people in. I also worry about therapists and the capacity, for example, to recruit therapists in paediatrics, which has been a big concern of mine. The HSE needs to focus on making sure it can attract therapists into working with children in specific areas, as well as in the areas of mental health, psychiatry and so on, where there are also difficulties with recruitment.
Deputy Paul Murphy raised the issue of statutory sick pay. It has not been delayed. It was always going to be 1 January and the Tánaiste made that clear from the outset. He was not in a position to bring it in before then because of a range of issues in notifying people and the processes that had to be gone through.
With regard to Deputy Boyd Barrett's point, again, the measures are designed to deal with those most in need. We have provided a vast range of supports.
Why are they not getting the ones that others are getting?
The supports cover not just those areas the Deputy has identified. Much more support has been provided in the budget over and above the specific payments to which the Deputy referred.