The collapse of Stormont and the subsequent inability to agree a three-year budget has "cruelly robbed" patients of the best chance in a decade to resolve the health service crisis in Northern Ireland, the North's Minister for Health has said.
The collapse of the powersharing Northern Executive following the resignation of the First Minister, the DUP's Paul Givan, earlier this month means Stormont cannot now strike a proposed three-year budget for 2022-25, a spending plan that envisaged a 10 per cent increase in funding for the Department of Health.
Addressing reporters at Stormont on Thursday, Robin Swann issued a direct plea to politicians to come together to find a solution.
“Today I am pleading, I am pleading with all parties and my fellow ministers to work together and sort out the budget, ideally by re-establishing the Executive, or failing that by finding some other way forward,” he said.
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“Our waiting lists are appalling, but in the absence of funding and a functioning executive they will likely get worse instead of better. That is the abhorrent reality of the situation we are currently facing,” he said.
Mr Swann said anyone who suggested “there are quick and easy answers are doing a disservice to patients, they are doing a disservice to the staff and they are doing a disservice to the public.
“There is no solution which does not involve significant and long-term investment.
“The fact that we have limped from one single-year budget to the next for the last seven to eight years was just another reason our health service has been unable to keep up with demand.
“The real damage caused by the loss of additional funding that the draft budget would have provided cannot be stressed enough.
“I still hope that some budget certainty can be raised from those ashes but in the likely event it isn’t, patients and staff have been cruelly robbed of the best chance they have had in the last decade.
“You can’t rebuild capacity without the certainty of funding and without training and recruiting the necessary numbers of staff,” he said.
The current strain on hospitals this week led the Northern Trust to declare a “potential major incident” due to severe pressures in the hospital’s Emergency Department.
At one point, 62 people needed to be admitted to beds that were not available in wards.
Mr Swann warned that the “ongoing deep crisis facing our health and social care system” had been “a decade and more in the making” and was due to “years of under investment, years of failure to properly workforce plan and develop adequate capacity.
“Years of poor performance management, years of kicking cans down the road in terms of reform, strategic leadership and targeted investment.”
He said the Covid-19 pandemic had “certainly helped to bring this crisis to a head” and the problem in an “already badly battered system is still reeling from the pandemic” was now one of capacity, with “larger numbers of frail and sick people, more than the system is currently able to cope with.”
Additional reporting - PA.
