In the budget, the Government announced an investment of €23.4 billion in Ireland's health and social care services. However, it has come to light that on 25 October, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, recorded the highest number of patients on trolleys in 2022, when 669 people, including 28 children, were without a bed.

I raise with the Minister the issue of hospital overcrowding this winter, specifically in County Louth. Although the winter plan for 2022 to 2023 makes significant promises on additional capacity and improved pathways of care, community emergency departments have become warehouses for admitting patients who are waiting to be moved to a hospital ward. By keeping patients in emergency departments, the capacity of those departments to function as they should is completely invalidated. Our acute bed capacity is 2.8 per 1,000 of population, whereas the OECD average is 4.3. If nothing is done about this, along with the 40,000-plus waiting time breaches, it is the complete opposite of what was promised in the national service plan. I want the Minister for Health and the Government to confirm they will listen to the practical solutions and measures put forward by the emergency department task force and will implement solutions immediately to prevent this entirely predictable situation.

Go raibh maith agat, Deputy. We are over time.

I would appreciate if the Minister would reply.

I thank the Deputy. I was in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, last week and met with the senior clinical team, including the emergency department nursing and consultant staff. I fully agree the resources that are needed have not been in place for a long time. The Deputy will be aware I have sanctioned a doubling of the number of emergency medicine consultants in Drogheda. We have launched phase 2 of the safe staffing framework, which will increase the number of emergency nursing and healthcare assistant roles. We are also talking to the hospital about additional capacity and, arguably more importantly, providing more step-down facilities in order that patients, when they are ready to be discharged, can be taken to a suitable clinical setting, meaning there will be more capacity in the hospital and for emergency medicine.