Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

This morning I attended the funeral of a constituent — a lovely, creative man in his early 60s who died last weekend in St. Vincent's Hospital. On Tuesday evening last week, I received a phone call from this man's wife. She told me that he was a health-insured patient at St. Vincent's and had been undergoing chemotherapy there for some time. On Thursday of the previous week he had been told he needed a blood transfusion and that he would be admitted to the hospital within the next day or two. When that did not happen, the family contacted the hospital and the man was advised by the medical personnel to present himself at the accident and emergency unit. He arrived at accident and emergency at 3 p.m. on Monday but did not get a bed until 6 p.m. on Tuesday, and then only in an annexe rather than in a regular ward.

I submitted this man's case for discussion on the Adjournment last week but unfortunately it was not reached. His case was not the only one of which I have been made aware in the past week concerning accident and emergency services in St. Vincent's Hospital. I was told about the case of a 76-year-old woman on dialysis who spent from 8 p.m. on Saturday until 5 p.m. on Monday in the accident and emergency department of St. Vincent's waiting for a bed.

The day before yesterday I received an e-mail from another constituent who wrote:

The services for cystic fibrosis, in my opinion, are, to say the least, inconceivably inadequate and that is not doing the bad service the justice it deserves. However, now it seems that for a cystic fibrosis person to get a bed in St. Vincent's Hospital it requires a long waiting period in A&E. My sister, highly prone to infection and very sick, went to A&E on Monday and there she stayed until Thursday, at one stage on a bed in a corridor about four feet wide, with three other patients sitting alongside her and one woman sneezing on her. I heard today that the other cystic fibrosis patients who need to be in hospital will simply not go in as they are either not up to the wait in A&E or do not want to risk the wait for fear of further deterioration in their health, most likely because of the psychological distress of the ordeal.

None of these cases reflects on the excellent and committed members of staff of St. Vincent's Hospital who do their very best in difficult circumstances. Each of these cases, however, calls into question the adequacy of St. Vincent's Hospital to cater for the needs of the entire population of the east coast from Ballsbridge to Wexford.

The Hanly report, which is no longer mentioned, but which is still the Government's blueprint on hospital services, examined the hospital needs of the east coast and concluded that the solution was to make St. Vincent's the major hospital serving the area, with all the other hospitals to be defined as local hospitals. St. Vincent's clearly cannot cope with the existing demands on it, much less the demands of the increasing population of the south Dublin suburbs, as well as Wicklow and Wexford. A new hospital is needed at Loughlinstown together with the upgrading of services at St. Michael's Hospital, Dún Laoghaire, to cater for the needs of local people.

The situation in St. Vincent's Hospital where sick people sometimes wait for days in accident and emergency for the scarce available beds is not acceptable and must be addressed urgently. That is not an adequate hospital service for such a large stretch of the country. The members of staff in St. Vincent's are under enormous pressure in trying to cope with the demands upon them. The three cases I mentioned are just examples of the many cases I have heard about. They involve people who are seriously sick and have to spend long periods in the hospital's accident and emergency department while waiting for a bed.

The Government constantly tells us that the country is teeming with money and that it has risen further in the OECD league table, but that type of third world hospital service is not acceptable, particularly to those who must endure it. The Government and the Minister are directly responsible for it.

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