Professor Colette Cowan:

To be clear, I did not say that I did not feel responsible or accountable. As the CEO, I am the accountable officer.

There are certain areas I can control and others I cannot. I cannot control capacity. I cannot close the doors of the emergency department. My aim and drive every day is to ensure that patients who walk into the emergency department and who may have to wait are treated when they arrive, are seen and that they get care in the system. We work on this all day every day. I spent two hours with HIQA the day it was on site. We spoke at length about all of the issues we have discussed here today. HIQA is a very supportive regulator and works with us.

We do feel responsible and accountable. We have come through a pandemic after two years. We have a fatigued workforce. We know that. We are trying to work with them and put in all sorts of improvements to help them. It is a continuous cycle of improvement. At the end of the day, if the ambulance service brings us on average 400 additional patients a month for care and people attend our emergency department instead of going to other areas, we have to deal with that. It is difficult and we are sorely sorry for patients who have to wait in an emergency department. Believe me, we have all experienced it with our families. The wait time is very difficult. We ensure patients are looked after. We monitor our mortality statistics to ensure patients get care. We apologise every day for it.

I am responsible. I am accountable. This is why since I arrived at UL Hospitals Group eight years ago, I have worked very hard to put in the additional 98-bed capacity, the ten critical care beds that we opened within a month and the vascular suite. We were the first public hospital in Ireland to have robotics. We have put in place a hybrid vascular theatre. There has been the expansion of our medical assessment units in Nenagh and Ennis. There is a gynaecological ambulatory clinic for women in Nenagh, a fertility hub in Nenagh, a new injury unit in Ennis and a new state-of-the-art theatre in Croom. Waiting lists in ambulatory trauma have been slashed in the area if members want to look at orthopaedics. We have done a lot as a management team during our short tenure. We will continue to work very hard on the unscheduled care aspect. I totally respect that Oireachtas Members get calls mainly about the trolley waits in the emergency department and not about the other fantastic services our staff provide.