Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join the other members in acknowledging the fantastic work of the ambulance service under difficult circumstances. I thank the witnesses for attending today to discuss the issue.

I wish to raise an incident on 30 December 2013 which occurred outside Carndonagh in Donegal where Maura Porter was the subject of a road traffic accident and had to wait almost 50 minutes for an ambulance to be dispatched. While there was an ambulance station in Carndonagh, the nearest ambulance was in Letterkenny. It was an hour and half before she arrived at Altnagelvin Hospital. The family requested an independent investigation. I requested, as did other Deputies, that HIQA look into it. The National Ambulance Service conducted a standard investigation after that incident. What happens to those investigations and can we have the review by the service published? Is it standard procedure in a situation such as that, where a family go through a nightmare scenario and a distressing situation, that the National Ambulance Service would revert to them to explain what happened to lead to such an unacceptable delay?

In response to a parliamentary question I tabled, it was indicated that the call was triaged correctly and the nearest available resource dispatched. Obviously, the problem was that the nearest available resource was so far away. It was also indicated in the reply to my question that the National Ambulance Service had now established an escalation process with Letterkenny General Hospital to ensure that ambulance control at Ballyshannon is informed at the earliest opportunity of any capacity activity or challenge which may affect service delivery. I ask our guests from the National Ambulance Service what exactly that means. Can they outline what happens where an ambulance is called away from its station to a hospital? What is put in place subsequently to ensure that another ambulance takes over immediately?

We cannot have a situation in which, if someone else requires an ambulance after that one has been called out, they are subject to pot luck and have to depend on an ambulance 40 miles away.