Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Debate contribution by Mrs Linda Dillon on 20 January 2026.

MLA

Mrs Linda Dillon

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 5348422

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate and to address the issues raised in the motion. No one in the Chamber denies the immense pressure being experienced by patients and staff in our emergency departments. Those pressures are real, visible and must be addressed. It is important that the debate reflects where we are now and not where we were last year. Health workers, nurses, doctors, paramedics, porters, care workers and admin staff are the backbone of our system. They work under extraordinary pressure, particularly through winter periods, and deserve recognition, respect and support. The Department of Health now has a record budget of over £8·4 billion, supported by additional allocations through the monitoring rounds. No previous Health Minister has operated with that level of Executive backing. That is fact, and it is not just financial backing. That is real, genuine backing, and that does not remove the problems and challenges that face the Health Minister. The key question is not simply how much money is available but how it is being used. Are we doing things differently? Are we learning the lessons of previous winters? Rita Devlin, of the Royal College of Nursing, was clear this week when she said that the Department needs to change how it delivers services. Those are the nurses, the very people who are delivering the service, so we need to hear the Minister outline how he is taking on board what Rita and others are saying. None of us wants to see a repeat of what happened last year: ambulances queued outside emergency departments, patients waiting for hours or days, and exhausted staff struggling to cope. The situation is unacceptable. I was contacted by a family whilst in the Chamber last week because their mummy lay on the ground in the street in Dungannon, in the rain, for over seven hours waiting on an ambulance. The risk to her health and the absolute indignity for that lady was a horrendous experience for her and her family. The Chamber and the public expect to see real outcomes in our hospitals, GP practices and in people's homes, regardless of when the planning began. The greatest difference that we know can be made is by keeping people out of hospital, and that must be a priority. We have talked much about the shift left, but that means strengthening primary care, and that means investment. Improving access to GPs needs investment — investing in community nursing, creating better pathways for access to the care needed and ensuring that domiciliary care packages are in place. If we are serious about easing pressures on emergency departments, we must strengthen frailty pathways across the system. Older people living with frailty are among the most likely to present at A&E in crisis, often because the right support was not available earlier in the community. Frailty pathways, including rapid assessment, same-day emergency care and hospital-to-home services, allow people to be treated safely without unnecessary admission. They protect dignity, improve flow through hospitals and ensure that those people are not ending up in EDs, which, quite honestly, are not suitable places for them, and we know all the reasons for that. That is why we need better use of community-based pathways, including dementia-specific support, to prevent avoidable admissions and support timely discharge. This is about patient dignity, system flow and staff safety. I want to be clear about the role of scrutiny. The Health Committee has repeatedly raised concerns about transparency. We can scrutinise only the information we are given, so if we are serious about reform, we need to have honest conversations, not only about the scale of the challenge, as was outlined by the Member across the away, but about how, when and why service delivery will change. We need to understand how the Department is going to address those issues and how we will change how services are delivered so that we can scrutinise that and consult properly with all the stakeholders and have honest conversations. This is really important stuff. Speaking as somebody who spent most of Christmas in hospital with my father, I can tell you that the staff are doing outstanding work in very difficult circumstances. We need to look seriously at how we are delivering services and the pathways. I did see through that experience where pathways maybe could be improved. When people are going to EDs and repeatedly ending up back on the same ward for the same reason, is an ED the best way for that admission to happen? Maybe it is, but we do not know. We do not get the opportunity to understand why that is happening. The Committee just needs to get more information to scrutinise and understand what is happening, why it is happening and how we can help you, Minister, to fix it.

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

Assessment

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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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