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

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, for coming to the House to listen to my concerns. I am sure she will appreciate the considerable level of concern and disquiet at national and, in particular, regional level about ambulance response times and follow-up capital investment for ambulance services in the west. She should be concerned because a recent HSE report clearly outlines that the ambulance service in the west is not performing well and that its response times are considerably out of kilter with those in other regions and international norms.

I ask the Minister of State to accept that there is a need to accelerate investment in the ambulance service in the western region which is quite large in geographical terms. The population of the region is entitled to expect adequate ambulance response times. The Minister of State will recall that the closure of the accident and emergency unit at Roscommon County Hospital was sold to us on the basis of significant investment in the ambulance service and the emergency medical technicians who provide it. I take the opportunity to acknowledge the dedication, commitment and, above all, actions of these staff. However, I request that the Minister of State consider the state of the vehicles they are obliged to use for their work. In the context of the HSE's recent figures for response times relating to clinical status 1 - echo - I also request her to investigate their capacity to operate properly. I do not wish to bamboozle people by using terms such as "echo", "bravo", etc. Suffice it to say that when someone suffers a heart attack, he or she wants to know that staff driving the vehicle with the blue lights on top will be able to get there, assist and transport him or her to hospital. The response times in Tuam and Roscommon are a source of great concern and significantly out of step with those which obtain elsewhere.

One of the underlying aspects of the support requested from the House in accepting the need to close the accident and emergency unit at Roscommon was that a world-class standard would come into being in the case of ambulance response times.

The situation is even worse for clinical status 1, which is when the service is in life-saving mode for cardiac arrest, respiratory emergencies and so on. The trip from Galway to Tuam on a blue light can take up to one hour. There is a brand new facility lying idle in Tuam but there has never been the required investment in human resources to cover what they now call in Tuam and Roscommon the Bermuda Triangle. We have no idea where the ambulance is.

I call on the Minister of State to cast her mind back to the "Prime Time" programme that investigated the matter. The Minister of State might remember the National Ambulance Service representative who said that the service did not have the people or the vehicles to meet the targets and that it was time for the National Ambulance Service to accept that the targets were unrealistic unless the cuts were reversed. Will the Minister of State make a statement with respect to my observations? Then in my two-minute slot subsequently I will introduce some of the statistical details of the report of the Minister of State on response times.

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