Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I applaud the Deputy for getting half an hour's worth of questions in right at the end. His experience is showing.

The most serious of the issues he raised concerns the tragic death of Vivienne Murphy. I express my heartbreak and my condolences with her family and friends. The Deputy asked about paediatric ICU services in Cork. The current clinical view is that paediatric ICU patients are to be transferred to one of the two Children's Health Ireland, CHI, sites in Dublin, that is, Crumlin or Temple Street. There is a significant investment under way in paediatrics in CUH, as the Deputy will know. We are building a new paediatric wing. Critically, it will offer single-room occupancy and it will go all the way up to high-dependency care. The advice we have at the moment is not to include ICU facilities but to include high-dependency care. Dr. Henry, my Department and the HSE will keep under review the best deployment of paediatric ICU services from a patient safety perspective.

The number of people on trolleys in Mercy hospital and CUH is a problem. Both hospitals are under sustained pressure. In preparation for this meeting, I asked for the cumulative number of patients on trolleys. The daily figure as of yesterday shows CUH was second in the country and Mercy hospital was third, which aligns exactly with the Deputy's point. I also asked for the cumulative figure for the year to date, which shows CUH is second to Galway, which had the most patients on trolleys. Mercy hospital is further down the list but I know there have been serious issues with patients and healthcare professionals there. We are investing a lot of extra resources in Mercy hospital's emergency department. My figures might be slightly wrong but, from memory, it previously had an allocation of half an emergency medicine consultant, who I understand came over from CUH to manage the Mercy hospital side. I understand that allocation has now gone up to three full-time consultants.

I will check, but it has gone up a lot. That is going to make a difference, and there have been a lot of additional, refurbished and new beds put into the Mercy University Hospital, but I fully accept that there is more that can be done.

On the long waiters, part of what we are doing in the waiting list action plan, and what the team is doing, is systematically going hospital by hospital. There will be a relatively small number of patients waiting for years, that is, waiting four, three or two years, and we are systematically going through that with the clinical teams. I know Mr. McCallion is involved in that, going through it with the clinical teams to say that unless there is some clinical reason, we have got to have nobody waiting for those periods of time. I fully share the concerns around those long waiters, and we are moving as quickly as we can to get them the care that they clearly should have had several years ago.