Sinn Féin claims Health Minister 'isn’t in charge' of department as waiting lists climb

David Cullinane said hospitals that consistently present the worst trolley figures - including a number of hospitals in Munster – appear to have “management issues”. File photo

Sinn Féin has claimed Health Minister Stephen Donnelly "isn’t in charge” of his department as hospital waiting lists reach record levels.

The party's health spokesman David Cullinane said while Mr Donnelly “has done good things”, particularly in terms of women’s healthcare reform, “the proof in the pudding is the waiting times”.

“They’re showing we’re not getting any real change,” he said. “My main criticism of (the Minister) is that he isn’t in charge of the Department and he isn’t in charge of healthcare reform."

He described as “unacceptable” the fact that the Minister has on two recent occasions – a spate of resignations from Sláintecare and the now-abandoned secondment arrangement put in place for chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan - not been informed for several days by his secretary-general Robert Watt of crucial matters.

“I would be very angry if I were Minister for Health,” Mr Cullinane said. “It’s about setting standards, it would be absolutely unacceptable to me if I was kept in the dark.” He said Mr Donnelly “conceded he was kept in the dark, but then doubled down and didn’t pause the process”. 

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“That’s a failure of leadership," he added. Mr Cullinane said that unless waiting lists are effectively addressed true healthcare reform will not be possible.

To that end, he espoused a ‘zero-tolerance’ principle for emergency department waiting times, something he claimed the Government “has no plan for”. Such an approach is one that uses better triaging of patients to reduce long waits.

To date in 2022, more than 51,000 people have waited for more than 12 hours in an emergency department. “Some hospitals are already doing this,” he said, citing the examples of Drogheda, Waterford, and Cavan.

He said hospitals that consistently present the worst trolley figures - including a number of hospitals in Munster – appear to have “management issues”. “If some hospitals are doing things better, then why are others not? Why are we accepting that?” he said.

He described University Hospital Limerick, which has consistently sported higher than average trolley figures for several years, as being “more than just an outlier”.  “There are serious problems in there, I think it’s a culture of management and not just resources,” he said.

Mr Cullinane dismissed the €350 million plan recently announced by Mr Donnelly aimed at reducing treatment waiting lists from their current high of nearly 900,000 people to their lowest levels in five years, saying that every Minister for Health for the past 20 years has announced the same plan to no avail.

Regarding the splitting of the HSE into Regional Health Areas – a key aspect of Slaintecare, which was finally approved by Government last week following much delay – Mr Cullinane said the commitment to the regionalisation of the health service had been “gutted”, with the new divisions set to be administrative in nature only.

“You have to set local targets in order to hold hospitals to account,” he said.