Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of questions. To follow on with regard to the community nursing beds and the acute beds, a lot of the hospitals are facing a big challenge at the moment and we are only starting the flu season. It is not uncommon to increasingly see a huge number of ambulances outside hospitals. There is additional money in the winter plan and so on, but most of the hospitals are saying it is due to lack of beds. A lot of the slow turnover is also down to a lack of beds within the system. I told the Minister's officials about the situation in Tallaght Hospital a number of weeks ago when there were 11 ambulances parked outside at one stage. A couple of weeks ago, there were six ambulances outside the Mater. There is clearly a problem there. One of my constituents was four hours watching her mother die on the floor while she waited for an ambulance to come. The journey would take maybe ten minutes in an ambulance. That woman's last memory of her mother is of her gasping for breath and dying on the floor. She died on the way to the hospital. There are many of those cases. Another woman from Wicklow was in contact with us. She had a broken hip and was waiting four hours for an ambulance. An ambulance ended up coming from St. James's and she was left lying on the floor with a broken hip. That is appalling. There are loads of those stories, as the Minister knows. There is a difficulty with bed capacity.

I will follow up on the questions about nursing home beds. The information we were given refers to 17 units closing and four reopening. Clearly, the scale is enormous. A lot of the homes that are closing are private facilities. The State needs to step up in that regard. Maybe some of the focus around this Supplementary Estimate should be on whether we are filling that gap. Clearly, what is happening in the hospitals is that those over 75 are taking longer to recover. If there are no step-down facilities, that creates blockages in the system. It is good that people are living longer, but there is a major challenge in this regard. There are 17 units closing and four coming into the system. I remember five years ago saying that we needed to be opening practically one nursing home a month to fill the gap that exists. There is clearly a gap. Is this Supplementary Estimate going to cover that?