Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

We could do an entire Dáil statement and debate on this issue, so I thank the Deputy for raising it. The Deputy has raised several areas: cataract services, orthopaedic services, spinal care and more. As I just said, our goal is universal healthcare. One of the pillars is affordability, which we just discussed, and another is rapid access. A huge amount of what we have been doing over the past four to five years is to speed up access to care. We have a ways to go. We are probably four years into an eight-year programme of work to meet the agreed ten-to-12-week targets. That is our goal. It has been agreed right across the Oireachtas. I acknowledge the work our healthcare workers have done and the progress they have made in the past four years. Their most remarkable achievement for patients in terms of waiting times is that the average time people wait for a hospital appointment has halved in the past three years and it continues to fall. It was in excess of 13 months; it will shortly be less than seven months, and the target is that no one waits more than three months. We are well on our way to achieving something that many people said was impossible and that would have Ireland as one of the most enviable public health systems around with those kinds of waiting times.

We have to acknowledge the work of our healthcare professionals They have put in extra hours, done weekend shifts and innovated. I will come back to some of the innovations on cataract services in a moment because the reductions in waiting times in this regard are fantastic. I want to be clear, however: we have a long way to go. As I said, we are about halfway through getting to what we all want, which is that nobody waits more than three months.

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