Dr. Niall Pender:

To put it in context, ten years ago the UK’s NHS, National Health Service, produced data on Huntington’s disease that showed 80% of consultations for the disease required a hospital admission, 48% of which were emergency. Ireland is probably much higher than that I suspect because by the time a person with Huntington’s gets to reach a specialist, the situation has already broken down and they will need to be admitted for an exceptionally long time. In Beaumont Hospital we have a number of people with Huntington’s disease waiting for placements for an extensive period of time. They do not need to be in an acute hospital but in a care environment. It is holding up the system all the way down and is not the right place for a person with a progressive neurodegenerative disease.