Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I raise this issue because of a letter written by the Irish Emergency Medicine Trainees Association to HIQA and the HSE. By any stretch of the imagination, it is extraordinary that people would go to these lengths to highlight difficulties in emergency departments. We have a situation where up to 400 patients can be waiting on trolleys at certain times in emergency departments throughout the country and the Irish Emergency Medicine Trainees Association has highlighted that this is an unsafe practice. The Minister has made great claims about the success achieved in dealing with the numbers of patients in emergency departments, but there is still a problem with overcrowding in emergency departments throughout the country. It is simply not the case that there has been a significant decrease in the number of patients on trolleys. There are still up to 400 patients at some times waiting to be transferred from the emergency department to a proper ward in the acute hospital setting or referred on to somewhere else.

One of the Minister's stated claims in his "FairCare" document was that the abolition of long waiting times on trolleys, how we dealt with emergency medicine and how we provided safe treatments in emergency departments throughout the country would be a central tenet of his policy. Even though, as I accept, there has been a reduction, after three years of the Minister's administration, it is the case that there are escalating trolley counts in emergency departments throughout the country. In addition, we now have the most senior clinicians in the country stating there are unsafe practices which pose a threat to patient safety in emergency departments throughout the country. Only before Christmas the CEOs of major tertiary hospitals were highlighting the fact that they were in the position where they could no longer guarantee patient safety. The Minister has put great store in the fact that he is a GP, but he should be conscious of the fact that senior clinicians have highlighted issues about patient safety and the transfer of infectious diseases and viral infections because of overcrowding and the fact that staff are under such pressure that it is, to quote the letter, "unequivocally dangerous for patients and staff". At some stage he must accept this fact. He is the last person in denial about this issue. He established the special delivery unit which was going to solve all of the problems in emergency departments throughout the country. There was going to be a sustainable and dramatic decrease in the numbers of patients waiting on trolleys. What we have found out since is that while it made inroads at the start, it is falling back quite rapidly to a point where this month there have been spikes of up to 400 patients a day in emergency departments throughout the country.

If one couples this with the Minister's other claims about outpatient and inpatient appointments, by any stretch of the imagination, these do not meet the aims of his document, to which I referred, which states:

ACCESS is a right - not a privilege

In health, delayed treatment can lead to pain, complications and even death. More than 150,000 people are currently waiting for an outpatient appointment...

Some 340,000 people are now waiting for an outpatient appointment.

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