Professor Orla Hardiman:

Donegal is served by Sligo. There are two colleagues, soon to be three, in Sligo who work hard and provide an outreach service to Letterkenny. The plan there would be to cover the people who live in Donegal appropriately through the service in Sligo as a hub with a high-quality outreach spoke into Letterkenny. The difficulty is Sligo is a really well-run, well-functioning hospital. My colleagues there work really hard and are top-quality neurologists. However, it does not have an academic link and it is not that well-served with respect to the overall multidisciplinary resourcing. It does not have a neurophysiologist, who is someone who does electrical studies on people. It needs a significant investment to make it a proper, well-functioning hub people want to go and work in and then provide that outreach to the north west and a really high-quality service in Letterkenny, which is a very busy hospital as well. It is really a question of recognising the geographic inequity and the need for substantial investment in neurological services. I do not just mean neurologists but the whole neurological team and the team of nurses required to make that service fully-functional. If we do that it will become an attractive place to work and that will significantly improve the reach and services for people in the Donegal area. That is what the problem really is. It is about having a critical mass within that hub.