Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Ambulance Services, Recruitment and Retention of Personnel, and Response Times: Discussion

Mr. Robert Morton:

That is possible. It is the work of the task-and-finish group. Some of what I have mentioned is already work in progress. Mr. Keeley has touched on the lower acuity calls we work on with our colleagues in Dublin fire brigade. Our clinical hub will look at a number of those calls already. We have a pathfinder team in north Dublin and in Tallaght. Many of the calls they respond to may have originated as 999 calls into Dublin fire brigade. Much of that collaborative work is already there and up and running. However, the question is about scaleability. I will translate it into numbers. At the beginning of 2022, we were managing 1.89% of all 999 calls through an alternative referral pathway. In January 2023, it was 4.4%. There has been a threefold progress. At one stage, we reached almost 5%. We know that the opportunity is there. It is just a question of a multi-year programme of investment to get to a point where we can offer the types of services that Sláintecare envisions and effectively provide those services, whether it is in Dublin, Carndonagh or anywhere else.

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