Peter Roche (Galway East, Fine Gael)

The witnesses are welcome and I thank them for their comprehensive opening statement. We seem to be constantly firefighting when it comes to adequate resources and facilities. One could be forgiven for thinking that many people fell asleep and all of a sudden have woken up to a situation where there are 5.5 million people living in this country. As a consequence of that, the demands have increased extraordinarily and there are more and more people presenting, sadly and regrettably, at accident and emergency departments with illness. Cancer is more prevalent. Going back 20 years, it was one in ten; now it is one in three or probably more than that. The demographics have changed considerably.

I have heard a few times in the responses that action is required now. Of course it is. Ms Fitzgerald mentioned that staff are always attracted to centres of excellence and places where things are going well. It is fair to say, and I hear it quite a lot, that staff rarely like a pressured environment where the demands are great and it is at times under-resourced. In pressured and under-resourced places where there is stressful work, retention becomes a problem and that poses a problem for the patient in accident and emergency.

It beggars belief that ten years on from that reconfiguration, UHL has the highest emergency attendance and the lowest bed numbers per capita. I find it bewildering, to say the least, that such a situation could arise. The statistics are always presented. We talk of projected population growth and one would think that would have flagged something to ensure UHL would not be the way it is right now. UHL is model 3, to my understanding. Is that correct?