Free contraception to be provided to women aged 17-25

Free contraception is to be provided for young women from next year as part of a budget package that will see health spending rise to a record €22.2 billion.

The recruitment of an additional 8,000 health staff, the extension of free GP care to children aged six and seven, and 19 additional critical care beds are also planned.

As part of a €31 million women’s health package, access to free contraception for those aged between 17 and 25 is being provided from August. Some €10 million of this funding will be used to address period poverty (where women and girls cannot afford sanitary products) and for other projects.

The recruitment of 8,000 people to the health service next year would bring overall employment to 144,000, Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath said.

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An additional €105 million is being provided for disability services; €37 million for mental health services, and €30 million for cancer and other strategies, and investment in trauma centres and transplant programmes.

In recognition of the continuing threat posed by Covid-19, €1 billion is being allocated to pandemic-related health measures, of which €200 million will be held in a central contingency fund. The funding will include €500 million for testing and tracing, the delivery of booster vaccines and for personal protective equipment across the health service.

Current spending on health is to increase by €1 billion (5.3 per cent), to €20.38 billion, or €22.2 billion when capital spending and the Covid-19 provision is included.

Some €250 million will be used on initiatives to reduce waiting lists. Most of this will go to the Health Service Executive, with €50 million reserved for the National Treatment Purchase Fund.

The extra money will be spent in the public and private hospital sectors, and on improving access for GPs to diagnostics. The Government is promising this will yield an “immediate improvement” in waiting lists, as well as continuing longer-terms reforms needed to implement Sláintecare.

An additional €10.5 million for critical care will bring the total number of intensive care beds next year to 340, Mr McGrath said.

To make health more affordable, the threshold for the drug payment scheme is being lowered to €100, and “significant improvements” will be made to improve access to dental services.

A €30 million package for new drugs will be used to provide patients with access to the latest high-tech drugs.

While free GP care will be extended to under-eights next year, the intention is to broaden it to under-12s in future, the Minister said.

Health unions welcomed the additional funding for the sector while women’s groups praised the initiative on contraception. But the Irish Medical Organisation claimed the extra money would not be sufficient to tackle waiting lists and criticised the lack of measures on consultant pay and GP supports.

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation called for the extra resources to be spent efficiently and said it wanted clarity on staffing issues.

“The same way we have a pupil-teacher ratio embedded in budgets year-on-year, we need to see a patient-nurse ratio that dictates what the safest level of staffing should be in each of our acute hospitals,” INMO general secretary Phil Ní­Sheaghdha said.

“While we have received absolute clarity today in the number of other public sector workers that will be recruited in the year ahead, we don’t know how many nurses and midwives will be recruited.”