Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

She is in there and she is working with the clinical body to try to change things. I will give the Senator one very quick observation. I have been in all of the emergency departments around the country, both those that are working well and those that are not. From what I hear from our clinicians, the single biggest difference between those that are doing well and those that are not is that, where they are doing well, the entire hospital staff see the patient in the emergency department as their patient. In the hospitals that struggle, patients in the emergency department are seen by those in the rest of the hospital as that department's problem to deal with. The hospital in Tullamore has had a very significant turnaround over the last three years. When I speak to the emergency department consultants and other consultants there, they say that, three years ago, if Mrs. Murphy needed to see a cardiologist, she would have been put on a trolley and waited there and then might have got a bed and got to see a cardiologist a few days later but that, today, the cardiologist comes into the emergency department and may say that Mrs. Murphy does not need to be admitted and that she can be seen in that cardiologist's outpatient clinic on Tuesday or whatever it may be. The people working in the emergency department in UHL three years ago said to me that they did not feel the entire hospital was working to either get Mrs. Murphy sent home with an appropriate care package or admitted to a bed as quickly as possible. That is one of the big changes.

I am encouraged by the latest HIQA report. HIQA reports on UHL have been quite rightly very hard-hitting for a very long time but the latest report noted that some of the reforms we have been looking for are now beginning to happen. It also says there is a long way to go for the reforms to have full effect but I called for the clinical community and leadership to step up and we are certainly beginning to see that happen now.