The Government will increase permanently the number of critical care beds in hospitals, the Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said.
The Minister told the annual conference of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) on Saturday that he accepted that Ireland still lagged behind the rest of Europe; with an average of five or six intensive care unit beds per 100,000 population. He said this was about half the EU average.
"I promise to change that. I am working with my officials in the Department of Health and with the HSE to implement permanent critical care capacity, including securing the capacity that was put in place in the short term. We are going to be doing that next, year, the following year and the year after that."
“As part of the response to the pandemic, funding for 42 additional critical care beds was put in place in March and we now have between 280-285 open critical care beds on any given day. This is a welcome improvement on the pre-Covid position, but we all know that it is not enough.”
Mr Donnelly did not specify how many additional beds would be provided. The HSE is understood to be seeking an additional 17 intensive care beds this year, 20 next year and a further 125 in 2022. This would bring the total in public hospitals to nearly 450.
The Minister told the conference, which was held virtually, that as well as the provision of additional hospital beds and staff he wanted to see investment in implementing key strategies such as on maternity and trauma care which needed funding.
“I want to see investment in national programmes, such as the maternity strategy, which have not yet had the level of investment required to progress them at the speed we must.”
Challenging
Mr Donnelly said his winter could be the most challenging in living memory for the health service.
“We need to support people at home, treat people in the community where possible, and then have a world class hospital system for those who need it. That’s the challenge in the coming months and years.”
The Minister said that capital spending for the health services next year - on buildings and equipment -would increase to €880 million.
Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane proposed that a 1,000-bed hospital for elective patients only should be built at Merlin Park in Galway where public land was available.
He suggested that this would take pressure off existing hospitals in the west, north west and south west.
He said there should be four elective-only hospitals built across the State.
He said Sinn Féin also proposed putting in place 1,100 additional hospital beds as part of its alternative budget.
He said frontline personnel including hospital consultants had not been given the tools and capacity they needed. He said consultants spent too much time fighting for equipment that they needed. He said that was the job of politicians.
Mr Cullinane criticised the two-tier pay system which, he said, saw specialist appointed since 2012 receive up to 30 per cent less than longer-serving colleagues.
The Minister said Government agreed in recent weeks to pass enabling legislation to address a number of pay issues.
“On the back of this decision I announced that we will be introducing consultant contracts for public health doctors. We will also be introducing a new Sláintecare contract (for hospital consultants). This will see full pay restoration in line with the existing A contract ( which provides for consultants to treat only public patients).”
Mr Donnelly said he supported pay equality for consultants on type B and C contracts - which have private practice rights.
“ This is something I committed to in Opposition. It is something I strongly advocated for at your conference last year. It is something I am still strongly committed to as Minister. I believe it to be one of the changes necessary to unlocking reform and addressing retention in our public system. It is a policy I am pursuing.”
IHCA president Prof Alan Irvine told the conference that there needed to be clear timelines for the promises new beds and hospitals to be put in place.
He called for greater devolution of decision-making from the HSE centre to the regions.
He also said that the two -tier pay system needed to be ended and the process for recruiting medical specialists to be escalated rapidly. He said this took far too long at present with up to 20 months in some cases.
Prof Irvine said Covid-19 “had sharply brought home the co-dependency that exists between a sustainable economy and properly resourced health system”. He will say that is a “ co-dependency which perhaps we didn’t truly appreciate up to now”.
