Mr. Ted Kenny:

I covered this earlier. When an ambulance arrives at an emergency department there are two pathways. First is a Covid pathway. If a Covid patient arrives, there could be a delay of anything between five and seven hours to transfer him or her from the back of an ambulance into the hospital. In normal situations where Covid is not a factor, it can take anything up to two and half or three hours to transfer a patient from an ambulance. That is all being considered at the moment in respect of working groups and that. We hope to have recommendations out this afternoon to address those issues.

The issue is twofold. We are relying on the handover from staff in the emergency department and they are under-resourced as well, there is no point saying any different. Because of the Covid situation there is a shortage of beds in acute hospitals. That is where the delays start. There have been times in acute hospitals where we could see between five and seven ambulances outside the emergency department, waiting for between two and seven hours. That has a knock-on effect when calls come through the national control centre for emergency work and there is no ambulance available. That is why we have an ambulance coming from County Donegal to County Tipperary.