An additional €18 million is to be spent on providing more hospital beds over the winter and ease pressure on the health service, Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has told the Dáil.
The extra money, announced by the Minister during a Fianna Fáil private members' motion criticising his management of the health service, is in addition to €51 million released to tackle long waiting lists and €74 million allocated to the overcrowding crisis in hospital emergency departments.
Mr Varadkar stoutly defended his record in health, asserting in a counter-motion that a wide range of measures have been put in place by the HSE to improve performance.
The HSE has provided 1 million inpatient and daycase treatments and almost 2.2 million outpatients up to the end of August, an increase of over 3,000 inpatient/daycase treatments and 40,000 outpatient appointments, he said.
Mr Varadkar said the emergency department taskforce had made significant progress, including a reduction in the waiting time for a nursing home bed from 11 weeks to four, an additional 1,200 care packages and hundreds of extra stepdown beds.
He also claimed the number of delayed discharges in hospital was reducing steadily from a high of 830 last December to 586 on September 15th.
In fact, according to figures supplied by the HSE, the number of delayed discharges has been moving slightly upwards again since August, when it hit a low of 547.
The Fianna Fáil motion noted the sharp increase in waiting lists, the abandonment of existing targets for cutting them and the failure to meet new, softer targets. It called on the Government to increase beds and staffing so the overcrowding could be eased and to restore the National Treatment Purchase Fund to ensure patients receive treatments in a timely manner.
Despite the measures taken, there were 383 patients on trolleys or waiting in wards on Tuesday, including 45 in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and 43 in University Hospital Limerick, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.
Mr Varadkar said he was determined to bring about further improvements in care services and waiting lists.
