Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Action Plan

Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on 20 February 2024.

MLA

Mr Alan Chambers

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

20 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waiting Lists: Action Plan

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4380605

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I welcome the chance to participate in this important debate. It has been two and a half weeks since the restoration of the Assembly and the Executive, and today's debate will, I hope, act as an important early opportunity for all parties in the Chamber to put on record their commitment to making tackling waiting lists one of their greatest priorities. The position with Northern Ireland waiting times is utterly abhorrent.

It is as outrageous as it is morally intolerable that we have so many people on waiting lists. We must never forget that it is recognised that, with the passage of time, some patients come to even greater harm while they endure the stress and pain of delay. I am sure that every MLA will know a friend or family member who is on a list for a consultation, a test or a procedure. Similarly, we will all have been shocked by the stories, experiences and, sometimes, delays that have been encountered by our constituents. As the motion rightly puts it, waiting times have been falling behind for the past decade. There are lots of reasons for that, but I will mention only two. The first is that decisions were consciously taken at that time by previous Ministers and senior officials to no longer bridge the gap between limited capacity and increasing demand with additional funding allocations.

I will.

I absolutely concur with those remarks. Whilst I understand that the Executive were facing financial constraints of their own, such unilateral cessation of funding put many waiting lists into a tailspin. As I said during the Budget debate yesterday, what would benefit the health service most is longer-term funding certainty, but, in the absence of that, specific waiting list initiatives would have been critical in slowing the tide. Secondly, an equally damaging slate of decisions or steps was taken on workforce. Critical training positions were either reduced in number or did not keep up with the necessary rate of expansion. Unfortunately, that left the workforce too small and fractured to be in a position to reverse what quickly became a rapidly deteriorating waiting list position. Whilst I note that the motion asks for an action plan within the next six weeks, with respect to the Members who tabled it, we do not need any more words down on paper; we need focused and targeted delivery of what has already been said to be deliverable, to which all political parties previously gave their support. The proposer mentioned the capacity that is available in the private sector. I suspect that the Minister would love to take up the offer over the next six weeks, if he had the money. Whilst, every so often, there is a glimmer of hope, such as the restoration of pay parity in January 2020 or a big expansion in training numbers, sadly, the failure of politics often gets in the way of permanent improvements, and regression creeps back in. I am fearful that, in the time ahead, we will look back to the most recent two-year period of political stalemate and the three years from 2017 to 2020 and see just how much enormous physical and mental harm was inflicted on so many of our people. Whilst there has been some hugely welcome progress made with the strategies and action plans that were published in 2021 and 2022, like so many other important areas of work, they have suffered as a result of funding uncertainty. Of course, it is not just the people who are stuck on waiting lists who have to endure the fear and concern of delay. We should never forget the moral distress being felt by clinicians. They can see the needs of their patients, yet, all too often, they know that the patient is not getting the support that they need and that, their skills and judgement tell them, is necessary. That is why it would be unforgivable if we did not maximise every opportunity that is available to us in and outside the health service. The proposer, in her opening remarks, referred to "uncomfortable truths". There should be no doubt that our absence from the Chamber for five of seven years has not been helpful to any of our public services. We owe it to the people of Northern Ireland to work together to pull our health and social care system back from the brink. We will achieve that only by working together and not making health a political football. However, I have a sense that we may drift into that situation. The public of Northern Ireland will not thank us for doing so.

772 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:38 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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