David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Dr. Herity’s report has essentially been torn up because the Government is now saying that the emergency services - the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. services - which are currently available at University Hospital Waterford will remain in place. The Minister and the Department have said that. If that had been in Dr. Herity’s terms of reference from the start and if he had known, while doing his work, that this was the outcome with which the Minister would run, would that have altered the final report?

The whole logic of Dr. Herity’s report is that the hospital should focus on planned work. How is it, then, that almost all of that planned work is now being outsourced to hospitals in Cork? We know that 130 patients who needed planned work have already been outsourced. I received a reply from the HSE which says that there is a service-level agreement in place between a number of private hospitals and a public hospital in Cork for the referral of patients from Waterford and that 130 have already been sent to Cork. The reply goes on to say that there will be three more phases, with 87 patients in phase one, 120 patients in phase two and 124 in phase three. What is happening in practice is the complete opposite of what Dr. Herity proposed and in that sense, we are getting the worst of all worlds. My simple question to Dr. Herity is a very obvious one. The logic of his proposition was that University Hospital Waterford should only provide for planned work and that emergency work should be done in Cork. However, the Minister is saying, quite rightly in my view, that Waterford should not lose any services and should hold on to its 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. emergency cover. The planned work is being outsourced to Cork. How is that in line with what Dr. Herity has recommended? Indeed, given that it is not in line with what he recommended, does that not show that this is a complete mess? If Dr. Herity had known what the outcome of the Minister’s interpretation of his report would be, maybe his analysis and observations would have been different.

Finally, the people of the south east and Waterford in particular were very upset with Dr. Herity’s report. Dr. Herity will justify his report but the people were upset for very obvious reasons. One thing that upset them the most was the notion that patients can get from any part of Waterford or the south east generally to a hospital in Cork or Dublin in 90 minutes. If a person has a heart attack, he or she has to call an ambulance and the ambulance has to come to his or her house. That takes time. The person then has to get into the ambulance and be transported to Cork. I do not know if Dr. Herity has used the Cork to Waterford road recently. It does not bypass a lot of towns or villages. When the person gets to the hospital, he or she has to be taken out of the ambulance and so on. What evidence does Dr. Herity have to show that this can be done in 90 minutes? In the context of those patients who have to be airlifted, did Dr. Herity know that helicopters cannot land in University Hospital Waterford or in any of the hospitals in Cork? They land outside the hospitals and patients have to be transported to and from the helicopters by ambulance.

I hope Dr. Herity will appreciate the wider point I am making. He published a report, which recommends that the hospital in Waterford prioritises planned work and outsources emergency work to Cork but the policy, it seems, is now the complete opposite of that. I ask Dr. Herity to respond to that point when he gets a chance.