Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Debate contribution by Mr Philip McGuigan on 20 January 2026.

MLA

Mr Philip McGuigan

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

20 January 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5348389

Read the official Assembly record

Text

It is a worthwhile debate. I thank the Members who tabled the motion: it gives us the opportunity to discuss the reality that patients, families and healthcare workers experience inside our hospital emergency departments. Given that my contribution will focus on patients and staff, I will get the politics out of the way early. Yes, the Minister of Health, like all Executive Ministers, has a constrained budget and could easily spend more money if he had it. Unfortunately, successive British Governments and their austerity policies have pillaged our public services, particularly our health service. I genuinely believe that the only way in which we can fully redress the problems that our health service in the North faces and give our citizens the best possible outcomes is in the context of an agreed all-Ireland health service. Does that mean that we should sit back and do nothing until we get a new Ireland? Absolutely not. Waiting times in emergency departments here are now among the worst in these islands. Our citizens deserve better. The problems that the motion identifies boil down to patient safety, staff welfare and system failure. It is the responsibility of us who work in this place to address all three of those issues. Patients regularly wait for hours, often into the following day, to be seen. Many are elderly, frail and disorientated. Some are babies and children. They are people of all ages and are injured or sick. Some are under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and some are in the middle of a mental health crisis. They sit together on hard chairs in waiting rooms or in the back of an ambulance, and then, once admitted, they are put on trolleys in corridors or recliner chairs in observation areas until a bed becomes available. Dignity and privacy are now left at the door of our EDs. The system is under intolerable strain. While it is a year-long issue, the problem becomes exacerbated at wintertime. What particularly baffles the public is the fact that winter pressure is entirely foreseeable. Distressed family members of elderly patients continually ask me what is being done to stop it happening year after year. It is a simple enough question. We see the same patterns every year with increasing severity. We have all heard and read the warnings from clinicians and professional bodies. We have read the Audit Office report and the Fiscal Council report, which is referenced in the motion. As the Deputy Chair of the Health Committee, Danny Donnelly, stated, he and I visited the emergency department at Antrim Area Hospital on a Sunday evening over the Christmas period to see for ourselves the situation. We saw ambulances lined up and parked outside the entrance, unable to discharge their patients. We saw care in the corridors and patients sitting in chairs, awaiting admittance. It was particularly informative, as Danny said, to speak to the staff about their view of the root causes of the blockages and the pressures that they face. I thank the staff to whom we spoke that night and all the staff working in our hospitals and health service for their work. Doctors, nurses, paramedics and support staff are being asked to operate in extremely difficult conditions. They are, in effect, holding the health system together at that critical point of care. Emergency departments are overcrowded not because of a failure in emergency departments but because of system-wide throughput problems. The Fiscal Council's sustainability report clearly identifies problems such as delayed discharges, insufficient step-down and community capacity and bottlenecks in social care and immediate care. When patients cannot move out of hospital beds, new patients cannot move in, leading to corridor care and ambulance stacking. Those issues have been diagnosed in detail, yet they remain largely unaddressed.

I totally concur. I fully support the introduction of the real living wage for home care workers. I will address home care in a bit more detail. Paying staff properly is obviously part of that issue. Last week, at Question Time, the Health Minister said:

"We do not have enough community capacity. There are patients who are clinically, medically fit for discharge from our acute hospitals who are still in beds in those acute hospitals because we do not have beds in care homes or packages of care to send to them in their homes. We all agree on that, and we all agree that the fix could take five years or more." — [Official Report (Hansard), 13 January 2026, p33, col 2].

I am not sure that we all agree on that. I agree from a constituency point of view, where I see the difficulties that families have getting care packages to allow their loved ones to be discharged from hospital. However, since December and during January, I have been contacted by numerous care providers covering four trust areas telling me that they stand ready to do much more than they are being asked to do but face constraints and obstacles from the trusts and the Department. They tell me that they have the capacity to clear many of the patients who are currently unable to get hospital discharge. I certainly do not agree with the fact that it should take five years to resolve the problem. Getting ambulance handover times reduced is also a necessity, and dealing with primary care is obviously an issue. I hope that Members will deal with those two issues in their contributions. I really hope that the Minister will give a commitment that winter pressure planning for 2026-27 will begin much earlier and that detailed plans will be published in a timely way. Patients deserve timely access to care at the point in their lives when they feel most vulnerable. Staff deserve to have safe, sustainable working conditions in which they know that they are making a difference —

— rather than having stress and moral dilemma.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:13 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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