Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This topic arises as a consequence of a report in last week's edition of The Connacht Tribune, which suggested that mental health patients from the east Galway mental health services who would previously have been directed to St. Brigid's Hospital were left on trolleys in an emergency unit in the middle of last week. From information the HSE gave the local media, it appears that the patients concerned may have been involved in a self-harm situation.

However, that does not change the fundamental principle that it is completely inappropriate for patients reporting with mental health difficulties to be left in an emergency department for any length of time beyond that required for their immediate treatment. It is particularly inappropriate in the case of those attending owing to self-harm because the emergency department is not a ligature-free unit, unlike the inpatient unit in St. Brigid's that was only recently upgraded at a cost of €3.1 million to provide a ligature-free environment.

From my discussions with the front-line staff - an exercise in which the Minister of State should involve herself - I have discovered that in the incident at Galway University Hospital, no psychiatric nurses were available to support critically ill people. I have also discovered that private security personnel were there to support general nurses with respect to their admission. Issues such as this will continue to arise and the decision to close a recently refurbished state-of-the-art unit in Ballinasloe is flawed. The Galway University Hospital psychiatric unit is simply not capable of undertaking the workload to be adopted from the east Galway services. The unit in Galway University Hospital has been subject to significant criticism from the mental health inspectorate. I call on the Minister of State to commit to carrying out a review of the decision to close St. Brigid's Hospital.

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