Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I was delighted to hear he got such good care in UHL. When we talk about UHL, we tend to talk about the consistent and unacceptable pressures for patients and staff in the emergency department. It is worth saying the hospital is making very considerable progress on its waiting lists and has been for some time. We need to acknowledge that.

We come back to the question around the trolley situation, put simply, in the ED. The answer to this is capacity and reform. Capacity in the hospital is very substantial. In the lifetime of this Government, there has been an increase in the hospital's workforce, believe it or not, of more than 1,100 staff, which is very substantial. It has gone from approximately 2,800 staff to 3,900 staff. That is a 40% increase in the hospital's workforce in the lifetime of this Government. That gives a sense of how much we have invested in that hospital. We added a lot of extra beds to the hospital. As the Deputy is aware, two 96-bed wards are being built on the site of the hospital. In addition, and the Deputy referenced the Reeves centre, UHL is getting one of the six surgical hubs. We are progressing that as quickly as possible.

As the Deputy quite rightly referenced, the medical assessment units at Ennis, Nenagh and St. John's, and the injury units, are going from strength to strength. The injury unit in the Deputy's local hospital in Ennis opened in 2022. I was very impressed by what I saw there. We are looking to standardise and lengthen the opening hours. When we were there, staff made the point that they were getting additional radiology equipment but they needed more staff and could do more. That is part of it. We have 13 injury units. They are a critical part of our urgent care infrastructure. People do not know about them enough. For example, leaflet drops by the HSE are now going on and there is online advertising and more to make people aware of the injury units. Those units can do more and more. When the Deputy and I were in Ennis, it was said to us that people were driving past the door of the injury unit to sit for hours in an ED at University Hospital Limerick when they could be in and out of the Ennis injury unit in half an hour to an hour.