Sinn Féin spokesperson on Health, David Cullinane TD, has expressed serious concern at crisis-level overcrowding in hospitals.

Teachta Cullinane said that record overcrowding is being driven by the government’s consistent failure to drive investment and reform in the health service. 

Teachta Cullinane said:

“Emergency department dysfunction such as this is a symptom of everything going wrong at the same time in a health service which does not have enough capacity.

“After nearly 2½ years in the job, the Minister for Health has yet to produce a multi-annual plan for the health service. 

“Hospitals are dangerously overcrowded yet there is no urgency to tackle this.

“This is now an emergency and must be treated as such. All options must be on the table including utilising private health care capacity. We must mobilise all available resources to take pressure off our hospitals, our front line health care workers and to provide better care to patients. 

“This emergency was entirely predictable. A shortage of capacity in our hospitals, insufficient GP capacity and particularly out of hours services and a lack of care options in the home and community are all factors driving patients to EDs. 

“The Minister for Health clearly has no plan and no strategy. Crisis management will not solve the core problems facing our health services. 

“Last year’s budget was the time to plan for this year’s winter, and yet not one single additional acute in-patient hospital bed was funded beyond existing commitments.”