Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 20 January 2026.

MLA

Mr David Honeyford

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

20 January 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waiting Lists: Effect on Winter Preparedness

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5348434

Read the official Assembly record

Text

It has been a really good and honest discussion — bar one contribution — that has been focused on people, but, with new Ulster Unionist leadership, we are getting new Ulster Unionist arrogance. Blaming the Alliance Party for criticising their Minister is pushing it to the absolute limit. The motion focuses on the extreme pressures that are on the people who are attending our EDs. Those pressures are felt most acutely by our constituents, who are the patients who are being left on trolleys or in ambulances or are the staff who are having to work under conditions that none of us would accept for ourselves or for our families. What has been happening, for years, in our health system has been shocking, as has the failure of concurrent Ministers to deal with it and bring about change and reform. At this point, it has, in fact, been normalised. As has been said repeatedly across the Chamber, the crisis was entirely foreseeable; it was forecast because we could see what was happening, year-on-year. It has been simply a failure to plan and to then resource that plan. I spoke yesterday to an ED consultant who said that what was previously a winter crisis has been left to become a 12-months-of-the-year crisis. It has become standard practice, but it spikes even further in the winter months. The Nuffield Trust's analysis of the productivity of Northern Ireland's health service sets out clearly why emergency care is under sustained strain. Its conclusion is set out clearly in front of us: emergency departments are not the problem. Dedicated staff are working flat out, but delays that are caused by a system that backs up with beds being blocked — patients being trapped because they cannot get home — leave our staff firefighting instead of doing what they are paid to do, which is treat people. We have brilliant front-line staff. All of us need to thank the staff for the job and the work that they do every day. They do an incredible job to make sure that everyone who comes into that department gets the best emergency care possible. It is the system around them that is failing them. They cannot move patients through or on, and that creates delays that no amount of goodwill on their part can fix.

Yes, of course.

I absolutely agree. The difficulty with a lot of this is that, as the staff said, the situation has become normalised; this has become the standard. That is what is being said. When I was speaking to those staff yesterday, they said that every problem is being filtered through the emergency department. People cannot get access to their GP — something that the Public Accounts Committee has been dealing with recently — and, when they do, the practice and outworking to be followed to get them into special care hubs mean that they still have to go through emergency departments. Everything is being filtered through that one department. When I was chatting on the phone last night, there were 10 ambulances sitting outside the Ulster Hospital: one of them was an emergency that went straight in, and nine were for patients who were catered for and cared for in those ambulances. The patients in five of those ambulances could have been dealt with by GP out-of-hours or community care. Those are the sorts of cases that are being left in emergency departments, because the services elsewhere are not there. Our emergency departments are not failing to meet time targets because staff are not working hard enough or because demand has surged suddenly; they are failing because the system is not functioning. Northern Ireland has a persistent problem of poor throughput. Patients who are medically fit cannot be moved on because there is nowhere for them to go: there is restricted care in the community; beds remain blocked; ambulances queue outside; and the corridors become holding areas. In England, there was a discussion about turning the lights off or dimming them at night. Hospital staff could not get over the fact that we have to keep the lights on in Northern Ireland while people are sleeping, because so many people lie in corridors in our EDs for days upon days. Our emergency departments are left to carry the consequences of the Department's actions. That issue was highlighted in the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council's 'Sustainability Report 2022: special focus — Health'. At that time, the Fiscal Council explicitly warned that, unless the issues of delayed discharge and patient flow were addressed, winter pressures would continue to get worse. That warning remains. It was never acted on, no urgency was ever given to dealing with it, and patients, our constituents, the public and hospital staff pay the price. We need the details of the winter plans to be published as soon as possible. We need those plans to be brought through, year-on-year, to allow for a better workforce, realistic bed modelling and genuine integration in social care and community services. That would bring a lot of transparency, so that gaps could be identified earlier and the Minister and the Department could be held to account for closing or not closing those gaps. The choice before the Assembly is clear. It is refreshing to have a debate in which, in the main, everybody is speaking with one voice to say that we need to back our EDs and move to bring change.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

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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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