Senator Gerard Craughwell- speech from 22 Jun 2022

Minister, you are welcome to the House. The motion before the House, I believe, is a very reasonable one and it is one I want to support. I sometimes feel sorry for a Minister coming in here to take a motion like this because the problems we are talking about have been endemic in the health system for as far back as I can remember. I was listening to Filney Hay on Sunday on the General Secretary of the INMO and she spoke about the shortage of nurses in A&E, it happened to be, on Sunday. And as I was listening to her I started to think back and my first time becoming aware of a problem with respect to staffing, I'm talking about the coalface staff, the medics in the health system, go back to when I was 10 years old, stuck in a bed in the middle of the long ward on the second floor of what was then Galway Regional Hospital because the hospital was overcrowded. Now it's a long time ago since I was 10 years old and nothing has changed. So Minister, you're not responsible but you have the opportunity to make changes and that's what we're here about. I also thought back to my cousin Kathleen Crockwell who was president of the INO back some years ago and then I remember speaking to her about shortages in nursing and nursing care. My own wife is a nurse and I remember she worked in A&E in Galway and they were always run off their feet. So the nursing profession has never, ever, ever managed to retain the excellent people we trained and educated in the system in Ireland. Because we trained them, as Senator McDowell said, to the highest level and we make them attractive to health services all over the world. And it is true for Senator McDowell, it's great for people to go away and build up the level of experience that's required and bring that experience back to this country. The problem is that the system is so under strain now, none of these excellent people want to come back. They want to stay in health services where they are not constantly under pressure, where they are not constantly facing into a situation where they're doing the job of more than one person. I mean, we see here that if you have the correct staffing, outpatient, if you have people, qualified nurses, supporting consultants in neurology, we see here outpatient time can be 40% reduced. We see that medication changes and the like that is required in neurological areas. I have a member of my own family who suffers from epilepsy and a change of medication is a very serious thing because of some of the side effects that are involved with them, some of the changes that occur and the transition period from one drug to another. So from that point of view, having experts you can call on and the experts I'm talking about are the nurses. I spent four months in tele-hospital one time, I saw my consultant twice a week, excellent man, wonderful, wonderful man, but I saw my nurses every single day, several times a day and they were the people who were the eyes and ears of the consultant, who could tell the consultant what was going on. So from that point of view, I think we just undervalue the nurses. But when I see 20 nurses short in this specialism in UCC or in University College Cork, so we're leaving a shortfall of 16. Vincent's in Dublin, 17 nurses, Tala, 17 nurses. We can see that these organisations are under severe pressure. I'd invite you, Minister, to travel over one day to Tala, to the neurological outpatients clinic and just see how under pressure the nurses are there. There are so few of them and the consultant, I mean, on an outpatients clinic, you know the way it works yourself, consultant comes in, everything has to be ready to move. The time the consultant is there is limited. So from that point of view, I think it's extremely important. I know that you will have other people in this house calling on you for additional resources, for A&E and additional resources for urology and additional resources for everywhere else. We really have to step back and ask ourselves that in the 50 odd years I'm talking about, how have we not advanced things? How have we not brought things to a better conclusion? People have been speaking to me about various things that I've brought up in this house, search and rescue being one. You and I had a debate on that a couple of days ago. And people, the Commission on Defence, people have said to me, no, you can't spend money on defence. We need that for hospitals and education. Finland, an economy much the size of ours, has an excellent education system, an excellent military, an excellent health system. Something is wrong somewhere and we're going to have to step back and see what it's like. The people who represent the voluntary organisations here today, they're doing a fantastic job. But they need the backup, they need the support and we need to step back and see how we can fix things for them. For the way we stand at the moment is terrible. I want to commend my colleague, Senator Boyan and Senator Macdull for the leadership they've given in this area. And I want to thank the party spokespeople that have spoken here today for their commitment to what was an independent group motion. And Minister, I do believe you'll do the best you can on this. I'll leave it at that at this stage. Thank you very much. Thank you.