Mr. Pat Healy:

It is across the board. All of us have seen that report but on a busy day in Limerick, there are 100 ambulances coming in. It is one every three minutes. It has a turnaround time of 38 minutes against our target of 45 minutes. Cork has improved significantly by more than ten minutes in recent times. There is a requirement for improvement in some of that in the western area. It is improving. It probably needs to improve more and we need to work and support them in trying to achieve that. As I said, we have plans in place. Significant progress has been made but more needs to be done.

On the advanced paramedics and paramedics, there are two pieces. Regarding the alternative care piece, we have 400 advanced paramedics. We fully recognise that they are a hugely valuable resource and we are committed to continuing the training programme. However, we also want to make sure we can align that better. We are not able to deploy the paramedics to the locations where we really need them. There is a roles and responsibilities dispute under way. If we implement that alignment, we will be in a much better position to deploy them. In the opening statement, I gave a commitment that once we have that done, we will expand that service to a greater degree.

We want to prioritise community paramedics. If we want to have paramedics in each of the community healthcare networks and expand that, we need to increase the training there. I will ask Professor O'Donnell to comment on the advanced paramedics as well. It is an important and specific issue.