Ulster Unionist MLA Alan Chambers has accused the Alliance Party of once again showing scant regard for the sheer pressures facing patients and health workers.

He was commenting after a Health Committee session in which an Alliance Party MLA became confused about the level of funding that had been available for allocation at an earlier January Monitoring round and then was also factually incorrect by implying that the health service had received a proportionately good outcome.

Alan Chambers said, “At this week’s meeting of the Health Committee, Alliance Party MLA Nuala McCallister rather bizarrely tried to claim that an allocation of £7m out of supposedly £10m went far in terms of an Executive prioritisation of Health.

“Unfortunately, however, her figures were simply incorrect as the Minister of Finance had already previously informed the Assembly that almost £17m was being reallocated but that she had already unilaterally decided to allocate much of it to the Departments for Infrastructure, Justice and Economy. Even though a simple breakdown of how the Executive overall spends its money, health receiving £7m out of £17m was proportionately a bad outcome for our patients and health workers.

"Despite the Minister of Health repeatedly reminding Executive Parties that they had earlier committed to support him to deliver the pay award for 2024/25, as well as to prioritise resources on tackling our wholly unacceptable waiting times, once again the January Monitoring Round was an illustration of Parties saying one thing but doing something completely different.

“Barely a week goes by without an Alliance Party MLA or Councillor writing to the Minister urging him to roll out a new service or invest extra resources in one area or another, and yet at the same time this week we had an Alliance MLA getting completely muddled up in numbers and not realising that once again the Executive chose to disproportionately prioritise other services ahead of the health and wellbeing of local people.”