Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Last week, there was a special "Prime Time" programme on the ambulance service. It monitored various counties and also looked at ambulance response times in Dublin. The programme was shocking as it showed interviews of staff and family members who made 999 calls, some of whom received appalling responses.

For example, one man explained how he rang 999 as his father had chest pain. Even though they could see the Wexford hospital from their own home, the ambulance took more than 50 minutes to arrive and unfortunately his father passed away. This man could not understand why ambulance control did not explain that there would be a delay, as he would have been able to drive his father to the hospital within a few minutes. When he queried this afterwards, he was told that people were not normally told there would be delays unless they asked.

A whistleblower from the mid-west was interviewed. She said that ambulance crews from the mid-west were run ragged and "going without food for hours" trying to respond to patients because of a lack of ambulances. She is an emergency medical technician. She said: "There are still not enough vehicles to cover an emergency. If a plane crashed, there are definitely not enough ambulances for it." She also said: "The situation of late response times for ambulance call-outs in Limerick is serious. There wouldn't be a day that would go past that you wouldn't be stuck somewhere for an ambulance going 'Oh, God, we've no ambulances to send there'."

The Health Information and Quality Authority report published last week confirmed that ambulance calls continue to rise by about 10% per year.

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