2026-01-22

1. Deputy David Cullinane asked the Minister for Health the measures she will take in 2026 to reverse the trend of increasing hospital and emergency department overcrowding and hospital waiting lists; the additional acute beds, step-down beds and home-care capacity added in 2025 and planned for 2026; the steps she will take to expedite elective centres; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [5082/26]

While the Deputy's question is quite broad, I know that it is really about access to healthcare which is what we all want. It is a priority for everyone in this Dáil, for me and for this Government. In December, the HSE published its national service plan for 2026, which sets out the services that the HSE will provide with its funding allocation. This builds on progress we have already made this year and in 2025. For example we have seen a 10% reduction nationally in patients on trolleys at 8 a.m. in 2025 versus 2024. That does not even show the real performance of some regions and other regions which are performing less well. That story is much better in some regions again. Twenty-four hour PET breaches, the time spent in an emergency department, are down 16% for all patients and by 15% for patients aged 75 and over compared to 2024. We now have 58% fewer patients waiting over 12 months compared to September 2021. We will continue to reduce waiting times for scheduled and unscheduled care in 2026. We have opened 1,481 new acute inpatient beds since the end of 2020. This year, we will deliver 177 acute and 428 community beds. Those are just as important as acute beds because they provide the opportunity for people to move out of hospital at an earlier stage and have the more suitable care that they need. The first new surgical hub opened in Mount Carmel in 2025. We expected it to deliver 3,000 procedures and it delivered 3,700 procedures. Of course, we are opening five more surgical hubs this year. Crucially, we will roll out the outpatient toolkit. That will be a big subject of discussion this year. We will roll that out across the hospitals in 2026. It is in Naas now and is working really well in Mercy, Tullamore and Kilkenny. That will enable us to increase our outpatient attendances both for new attendances and we will provide more services and clinics at the weekends and in the evenings. We will expand virtual care in hospitals and the community. We are also targeting delivery of over 26.7 million home support hours.

I thank the Minister. I want to point out that families are waiting. I have dealt with a few patients in my constituency in the past month who were waiting to be transferred to Beaumont and the Mater hospitals in Dublin. It took up to four weeks before they were transferred so they are taking up beds in Cavan Hospital when they could be transferred on. I am wondering about the new HSE system, or app, that is in situ. Is it operating so other hospitals know when patients can be transferred and if bed management in other hospitals is actually happening and that hospitals are communicating with each other to ensure that patients are being moved out? A lot of the time people are taking up beds in hospitals where, in my constituency for instance, Cavan Hospital could not offer them the services they required and they need to be moved out. It is also happening in relation to step-down units. We have a perfectly good step-down unit in Monaghan Hospital. I have brought this issue to the Minister previously in relation to Cavan and Monaghan. More patients could be transferred to Monaghan Hospital to the step-down unit there to free up beds.

I am very glad to have this timely opportunity to have this discussion with the Deputy. The reason is officials from her region and the three Dublin regions will be in with me on Monday for a whole day to go through some of these issues exactly because we are trying to manage healthcare as a region. There are patients in Cavan who will need to be treated in Beaumont, a specialist centre for neurology, or the Mater, a specialist centre for cardiology. That patient flow is absolutely crucial and so patients are moving out of Beaumont at an appropriate stage so as to enable the specialist care. We have to think of healthcare as a region and that it is just as acceptable for people to move back from Beaumont to Cavan to free up the space for somebody from Cavan to go to Beaumont. Regarding what the Deputy said about the step-down facilities in Monaghan, I would be very glad if she has specific examples that she can give me before Monday because it is precisely those that I will be testing in person with the different regions on Monday in great detail. The better the local examples I have for that the better I can test and push and make sure the efficiency in that flow is there. I would really appreciate the Deputy’s support to me in giving me that local knowledge before Monday.

I thank the Minister. I would love to work with her to ensure that people do get the step-down units and be able to use them in Monaghan Hospital. Monaghan Hospital was closed a long time ago but there is so much potential there. There are rooms available that could be used for more step-down units. I will definitely come back to the Minister on that. On the app, is there communication right across the board about patients, hospitals, doctors and nurses? Are they using the app to make sure that patients are being moved on? If there is, say, a cancer diagnosis that cannot be dealt with in Cavan, are they using the app to make sure that patients are being moved on in a timely manner?

There might be two slightly different issues there. The HSE app is a patient-focused app in the first instance. People can make appointments and see prescriptions. Its functionality is improving over time to be able to book appointments. It is slightly different from the broader shared care record and electronic health record. The shared care record which we are rolling out this year is the technology to be able to see if patients are moving from Cavan to Beaumont that Beaumont can immediately see all their healthcare needs without files needing to be transferred and all of those delays. It is separate to inter-hospital patient flow. That does happen but the delays are largely around space and capacity. That is why we need to make sure that we are increase our acute and community beds and really utilising fantastic hospitals like Monaghan that have so much capacity, not to do the acute work but to do other very important community-based work – to be able to do infusions and use step-down beds and the really important work it can do working in partnership with Cavan. I want to compliment both hospitals on how much progress they have made this year to serve the people of Cavan and Monaghan.

I thank the Deputy