Debate contribution: Winter Preparedness Plan

Debate contribution by Mr Colin McGrath on 10 November 2025.

MLA

Mr Colin McGrath

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

10 November 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Winter Preparedness Plan

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5225366

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. The motion comes from a simple but urgent concern that our health and social care system is, once again, entering the winter without the confidence, clarity or coordination that it deserves. Each year, we see the same story repeated: staff stretched beyond endurance, patients waiting too long for care and plans that arrive too late to offer real assurance. Each year, we hear the voices of health professionals saying that we need to do more to prepare for next year, and, each year, the Department of Health somehow misses the mark.

The Opposition motion is not about scoring points; it is about recognising that our system and the dedicated staff who keep it standing cannot keep absorbing crisis after crisis without change. At the heart of the debate are the people who hold the system together: nurses, GPs, allied health professionals (AHPs), care workers and all those who show up every day with professionalism and compassion. I will highlight some of their voices today. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and the Community Rehabilitation Alliance have been crystal clear: they tell us that community rehabilitation, which is one of the most effective tools we have to improve patient flow and reduce hospital demand, remains largely invisible in this year's plan. The Department has had a draft community rehabilitation framework ready for some time, yet it still has not been published, and no explanation has been given for the delay. That is a real missed opportunity, because rehabilitation is a necessity. Physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and rehabilitation assistants enable people to recover safely at home, prevent avoidable admissions and support timely discharge. While the plan includes some pieces of the puzzle, it does not have a strategic framework. We need a clear home-first, rehab-first approach embedded across all future winter plans. Allied health professionals more broadly, the second-largest workforce in our health system, have also been overlooked. Aside from paramedics, they do not appear in the plan at all, and that omission matters. AHPs are essential to keeping people independent, mobile and out of hospital. Excluding them from planning discussions means that we are underusing one of our greatest assets in tackling winter pressures. The Alzheimer's Society has similarly voiced deep concerns that dementia is not mentioned in the plan. That is startling, when dementia now accounts for over 16% of winter mortality and, we are told, is the leading cause of death in Northern Ireland. One in six patients in hospital at any given time has dementia, and there are about 15,000 A&E visits each year by people with undiagnosed dementia. The plan talks about older people living with frailty but fails to recognise that many of those people are living with dementia. Including dementia expertise in the Department's "Big Discussion" could have helped to ensure that training, discharge planning and community support were properly aligned with the reality on the ground. We must do better. The Royal College of GPs (RCGP) has warned that GPs are again being asked to deliver more with little extra support. The additional winter funding this year equates to about 2·5 days' worth of appointments spread across four months, a figure that simply does not reflect the scale of the challenge. GPs are the foundation of community care. If we continue to under-resource them, the pressure will spill back into emergency departments and the cycle will repeat itself. This is what our motion is about: coordination, communication and accountability. We have the people, the skills and the ideas to make winter preparedness meaningful, but it requires joined-up planning that values every part of the workforce, listens to all the professional voices and acts on evidence. The amendment rightly acknowledges additional funding for staff pay. I welcome that recognition, because fair pay is not an optional extra. However, it leads me to one reflection: is it not amazing how other Executive parties — this is not exclusive to the party proposing the amendment — will readily throw the Minister under the bus when he needs the funding but, when the money suddenly appears, they all jump at the chance to declare that they were the ones who found it? The motion does not seek to attack the Minister or throw him under the bus; rather, it simply says that, if we listen to the voice of our healthcare staff and make fairness and coordination the hallmarks of the system, next winter perhaps, for once, we will not be talking about coping with a crisis but instead delivering care with confidence.

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

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:45 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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