Hospital bed capacity
Charlie McConalogue highlighted the long wait of a cancer patient in Letterkenny for transfer to St. James's and linked it to the Government's bed-capacity commitment. The Taoiseach expressed sympathy, said individual intervention was unlawful, and argued that hospital bed numbers had been cut under previous governments.
In relation to the commitment in chapter 5 of the programme for Government to increase bed capacity in hospitals, I refer to Ms Lorraine Miller, a young mother who is fighting cancer and who has been in Letterkenny University Hospital for 13 days awaiting transfer to the oncology unit in St. James's Hospital. I give her details here in the Dáil today because her husband, Stephen, had to go on Highland Radio this morning, out of frustration and concern for her care, to raise the fact that she has been waiting 13 days for a transfer to the unit where she needs to be. Will the Taoiseach intervene to ensure this lady gets the treatment that she requires and gets an immediate transfer to St. James's?
Comment on this
I am very sorry to hear about that case and I hope it is resolved soon. It is, of course, illegal for me or the Minister for Health to intervene to direct the HSE to do anything when it comes to an individual case, according to the Health Act which the Deputy's party wrote.
The Deputy is correct in saying that we do not have enough bed capacity. That is absolutely true. We used to have 12,000 beds in our hospital system. We had 12,000 in 2005. Fianna Fáil and the Green Party in government, for ideological and policy reasons, took 2,000 beds out of our system and brought it down to 10,000. As soon as we had the money, in 2014-2015, my party and the Labour Party reversed that. We are now back up to 11,000 beds. We need 2,000 more.