Ulster Unionist Health Spokesperson, Alan Chambers, has called on other Parties to stop spinning inaccuracies over baseless claims of additional funding for the health service.

He was commenting after a DUP MLA inaccurately claimed that an additional £76m had been allocated to the Department of Health to tackle waiting times. 

Alan Chambers said: "On Thursday evening's The View, DUP MLA Phillip Brett stated, 'he (the Health Minister, Mike Nesbitt) just got an extra £76 million pounds to tackle waiting lists, so there has been additional money given to the Department of Health.' 

"That statement is wholly untrue - there has been zero additional funding provided, either now or at any point this year, to tackle health waiting lists. 

"The £76m that Phillip Brett is either deliberately or naively misinterpreting is what had already been long committed to for tackling waiting lists. Specifically, it is going to be entirely spent on trying to bridge the gap in demand for red flag and time-critical waits. The funding is necessary just to stand still and there is nothing at all new about the money, and it's certainly not additional. The £76m is made up of £34m from the UK Government that was announced in February, with the remaining £42m coming from internal Department of Health prioritisation."

"Instead, if the DUP and every other Party increasingly trying to blur the lines of fact and fiction between health spending were being honest, they would acknowledge that whilst the £76m matches the internal Department of Health investment that was made last year, it is significantly less than the year before that.

"In the run-up to the 2024/25 Budget, the Department of Health submitted an ambitious proposal to actually spend £135m to tackle health waiting times. 

"The plan proposed a major focus on outpatients who have been waiting for the longest, running a series of one-stop-shop mega-clinics, as well as funding our GPs to deliver greater levels of elective care. In addition, it also suggested the reinstatement of a reimbursement scheme – similar to the previous hugely popular cross-border scheme – in which patients could have travelled outside of Northern Ireland and claimed some of the costs back. 

“Yet the Budget that was eventually passed by a majority of Parties in the Executive and Assembly, failed to include a single penny extra for waiting lists. Phillip Brett knows that, the DUP knows that, and the position hasn't changed since. Any attempts to try to tell the public anything else at this point is entirely insincere and false."