Fine Gael 'doesn’t know how to get things done' on health, Stephen Donnelly claims

A Fianna Fáil Government would spend €2bn on the health service and introduce 2,600 new beds over the next five years, the party’s health spokesperson has said.

Speaking at an event to launch their approach to the crises being seen in health, Wicklow TD Stephen Donnelly said that Fine Gael couldn’t solve the trolley crisis because “it doesn’t know how to get things done”.

It has systematically alienated healthcare professionals, it doesn’t understand the problems on the ground.

Mr Donnelly, who is a former management consultant who says that knowledge gives him the ability to fix the health service, said that the way to end overcrowding is to focus on primary care, on resourcing GPs and providing them with diagnostic facilities to stop people from attending emergency departments who don’t need to be there.

His €2bn budget is roughly half the outlay that the Government is spending on health at present per annum. The current health budget is €17bn, and was raised €1bn as part of Budget 2020.

He said that his party plans to reduce waiting times on average in emergency departments from six hours to four.

“If we do these things, if we equip general practice, and if we give the emergency departments the resources they need, and we make sure that there are beds available for admission into hospital, we can make a big difference,” he said.

Regarding the issue of consultants and the €250,000 starting salary that the Government promised before Christmas would be brought in in 2020, Mr Donnelly said that he would engage directly with consultants in order to “reverse pay inequality”.

“The Taoiseach announced that (the €250,000 contract) out of the blue, with no negotiation with consultants, with no reference to costs,” he said.

He did say however that “doctors abroad are saying I want to come home, but I’m not coming home to be paid €70,000 less”.

“We are being very, very careful and prudent to make sure that the commitments that we are making are costed and that they can actually be provisioned for.”

Mr Donnelly was more wooly on the thorny issue of private care being taken out of public hospitals. He said he was “totally committed” to universal health care, but said it “remains to be decided” if consultants, having satisfied their public remit each week, would be allowed to do private work also.

He said that a key way in which costs could be reduced in order to apportion elsewhere would be via an overhaul of the HSE’s recruitment processes, which he said were overly complicated.