Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Debate contribution by Mrs Diane Dodds on 20 January 2026.

MLA

Mrs Diane Dodds

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

20 January 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5348426

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Like others, I start my remarks by recalling a constituent's experience. A couple of weeks ago, I was phoned by a constituent whose elderly father-in-law had fallen. It took 23 hours to get an ambulance to that gentleman, and, 24 hours after that, he was still in the back of the ambulance at Craigavon hospital, leaving him confused and the family extremely worried about him. Everyone across the Chamber can recount a similar story, and that is not the health service that we want to be talking about today. I support the general thrust of the motion, but it misses a quite important point. It is not about the time in which you have to prepare; it is about what you prepare for and the scale of your ambition in preparing for winter, because, as sure as day follows night, we will have a winter and a series of winter pressures. I put that on the record.

Thank you. I was just about to come on to that, so the intervention is very timely. One of the problems with the winter preparedness plan is that it failed in the scale of its ambition. It did not address and tackle head-on the really big issues. The big issue is the flow through hospitals. If we cannot get patients out of hospital, others will be queued in corridors, waiting for a bed. I looked at Friday's figures. Last Friday, 640 patients were declared medically fit for discharge from our hospitals but were in an inpatient bed. Meanwhile, 350 people in our EDs were assessed as requiring admission to one of those beds and were either sitting or lying uncomfortably in a corridor or some other unsatisfactory space in an ED. They were among the 373 people who waited more than 12 hours in an ED in Northern Ireland. Over the previous week, 2,768 people waited more than 12 hours. That means that 22·5% of everybody who attended an ED in Northern Ireland waited that length of time. It does not take someone who is incredibly smart or anything else to tell us that, if you cannot get people out of hospital, it will be extremely difficult to find beds for others. Minister, despite all the planning groups that have been set up, that issue still has to be tackled, and we will not see an improvement until we tackle it. That is one of the most important things that we can do. I want to address a couple of the projects in the winter preparedness plan, including geriatric assessment and care plans. Those were to be directed at three practices in west Belfast. How many of the 10,000 medical plans have been carried out? Take the acute-care-at-home service. That is what I mean when I talk about scale. At one of our Committee meetings, Tracey McCaig said that the Northern Trust did not have an acute-care-at-home service. She said that it was being set up in November and would cater for 10 patients. Clearly, that is great for the 10 patients who get it, but it is not being done on the scale that is needed. In addition, how have the pressures on mental health and learning disability beds been improved through the winter preparedness plan? I will say a few words on the amendment. I agree in one sense with the amendment in that we should expand and invest in our staff and healthcare facilities. However, I will not vote for the amendment, because the reality is that we need the private sector to take some of the pressure off healthcare waiting lists. Just think of those 540,000 people in Northern Ireland who cannot get a first consultant appointment and have been waiting for many years. Another reason why I will not be voting for it is that this is the same Chamber that regularly votes for, and asks for, more and more money for the reimbursement scheme to send people — where? — to private clinics in Dublin. Anyone who votes for that needs to think very, very carefully about what they are doing.

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

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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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