Debate contribution: Health Crisis

Debate contribution by Mrs Linda Dillon on 3 February 2025.

MLA

Mrs Linda Dillon

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

3 February 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Health Crisis

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4774502

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the proposers of the motion and those who tabled the amendment for bringing the issue to the Floor. We need to be solution-focused. As the proposer of the motion said, let us take the politicking out of this. I do not think that anybody in the Chamber has ever said, at any point, that the Health Minister has more than enough. I can absolutely stand over that. I start almost every debate by telling him that I understand that he does not have enough. That is clear and has been made clear in the Chamber by all who speak on health. He does not have enough. Yes, he has a significant budget — over half of the Budget — but it is still not enough. What is important is how we spend what we have. Whilst what he has is not enough — this is not the first time that I have said this — what is important is how it is spent and how we use those limited resources. I totally understand that the Minister needs an increase in the Health budget in order to recruit more staff and to modernise facilities and technology to improve our health service. Whilst the Health budget has had a funding uplift and inflationary increases, the increased service cost and significant increases in demand have placed pressures on our resources. How do we spend what we have? We have talked about winter pressures, but they are no longer winter pressures; they are all-year-round pressures. Social care needs to be seriously looked at and invested in. I know that there is a lot of work going on in that space. It is our job to support that work and to look at where we can offer solutions. I would like to see the implementation of a targeted recruitment and retention strategy. That is important, because we know that we are failing miserably in recruiting and retaining, particularly in the social care aspect of our health service. We need to look at how we will improve that. We need to address the staffing shortages across our health service. That is everything from social workers to doctors, GPs, nurses and domiciliary care — all healthcare workers across the piece. We need to ensure that we have a better recruitment and retention strategy. We need to introduce measures to streamline patient pathways. When I speak to people, it seems that that is a really difficult part of the health service for them. It is clunky. It is going to your GP, returning to your GP, going back to your GP, going somewhere else and going back to your GP. We are finding that there are not clear pathways. Again, that is often a resource issue or not being able to get people off a waiting list. We need to look at innovative ways of reviewing the situation. Some patients on waiting lists should no longer be on them. We are not having the type of review to make sure that people are not on waiting lists that they should not be on.

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

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:53 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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