Debate contribution: Winter Preparedness Plan

Debate contribution by Mr Patsy McGlone on 10 November 2025.

MLA

Mr Patsy McGlone

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 5225452

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I thank all the Members who have contributed to the debate. There are common threads running through all the contributions — from my colleague Colin McGrath, Órlaithí Flynn, Diane Dodds, Danny Donnelly, Alan Chambers, Alan Robinson, Nuala McAllister and, indeed, Colm Gildernew — in the references to the very real issues that affect people on the ground in our constituencies: our neighbours and friends and the problems that they are faced with. We are one year into the Minister's three-year strategic plan, which is apparently based around the three pillars of stabilisation, reform and delivery. Unfortunately, there is no stability. If you visit any of the emergency departments, it is often just madness, and doctors and medical staff are having to try to deal with that. The stability is certainly there in regard to the waiting lists, in that they are at record lengths. I will say one thing, Minister: the waiting list reimbursement scheme is having a material effect, and a good effect. There is one aspect of it that is not necessarily within your Department or even within the trusts, and that is the communication from the hospitals in Dublin, particularly the UPMC Sports Surgery Clinic, to the relevant staff here. I had a case recently where a gentleman had a double hip replacement. He was due for discharge last Friday or Saturday, and the trust here did not even know that he was due for discharge, because it had no communication from the hospital in Dublin. It was the hospital's duty and responsibility to inform the central comms centre so that a discharge package, whether that was occupational therapy, physio or rehab, be put in place for him. The scheme needs a wee bit of tweaking around the edges, but it is a good scheme, and many a person visits their local credit union to help out with it.

As my party colleague said, we accept the Sinn Féin amendment, noting the allocation of £100 million from the Executive Budget towards the overdue pay settlement for healthcare workers. However, as the Minister outlined, the belated allocation will not cover the full cost. I trust that he will not, but it looks as if he may have to overspend his budget for this year by an additional £100 million to fulfil that pay settlement, and, as he pointed out, it is a pay settlement, not a pay increase. It is yet another example of the Executive's annual cycle of crisis management. If health and social care staff have finally secured long-overdue pay parity with colleagues across these islands, it has come about after months of confusion, mixed messages and public infighting between Ministers. As the joint First Minister helpfully told the media last week:

"The Executive has found the entire amount for this pay parity pressure. The Department of Health could not fund any of it."

I do not know what that is supposed to mean. I am sure that the Minister has been grappling with that too. Nevertheless, if the Executive could find that money now, they should have found it months ago without causing the unnecessary anxiety for healthcare staff. We need long-term planning for funding and genuine Executive coordination, which the public and healthcare staff want to see. We cannot have the Executive scrambling at the last minute to fix problems that have been there for a long time. Everybody knows what the problems are. It is just about getting a plan to fix them. Whether it is the child waiting for an operation, the adult waiting for treatment and care in hospital for a medical condition or the older, or maybe not-so-old, person waiting for joint surgery, those are our constituents. They are people with real, human conditions: our very real neighbours, friends and relations. Let us have no more public arguments between the First Minister and the Health Minister. People just want this to be resolved. A common theme has run throughout the debate. At the end of July this year, around 3,000 people in the North were waiting for all or part of their home care package. Almost 1,000 of those people were in the Northern Trust area, which is mostly my responsibility in my constituency. That was during the height of the summer, before the start of the build-up of pressures. The Minister has referred to flu vaccines and a peak in the earlier set-in of the flu in the community. The figures were from before the start of that. For as long as I have been an MLA, I have encountered the same problem, year in, year out, except that it appears to have started earlier this year. A key element of alleviating those winter pressures on the health service is ensuring that —

— when a patient is medically fit to be discharged from hospital, the appropriate care package and support are available for that person.

822 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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