Varadkar has ‘dropped ambition to reduce waiting lists’

The Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has dropped his ambition to reduce waiting lists, Fianna Fáil health spokesman Billy Kelleher has said.

The Opposition TD was reacting to details of the HSE’s service plan for next year, considered at Cabinet on Tuesday, which says thousands of hospital patients will not be treated within the Government’s official maximum waiting times next year.

“The Minister has decided to drop his ambitious plans for the reform of health services and drop the ambition in terms of reducing waiting lists,” Mr Kelleher said.

“We now have a situation where the Minister is actually saying that we are now going to find it acceptable that people will be waiting 15 months for procedures and appointments and operations, when previously that target was eight months.

“So we’ve a Minister that’s lacking ambition in terms of the health services, maybe [HE]has ambitions elsewhere.”

Mr Kelleher said the Government had no plan for health and listening to Mr Varadkar “lecturing” about health policy was like “listening to the oil companies lecturing about the environment”.

He said the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) had been warning for a long time that patient safety was being compromised, while consultants were “outlining the horrors that have been visited” on people in emergencies departments.

He said frontline workers needed more resources and patients had to be treated with dignity and respect.

Nurses who had left Ireland to work in the UK should be attracted back, Mr Kelleher added.

“We do need to make it attractive for them. We do need to retain them. We need to bring almost 6,000 that have left over the last four years and have gone to the UK, we need to attract them back.”

He was speaking outside Leinster House on Tuesday morning.