Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending in the Chamber to respond to this Topical Issue. He is aware that nurses in Galway have announced they will work to rule from 3 February onwards. This is not the first time they have raised conditions in the accident and emergency unit in Galway. They had a one-hour protest in September, at which time I engaged with them and we have been trying to come forward with a number of solutions. In fairness to the hospital, it has taken some steps. There has been limited recruitment but not enough. At the time I raised the matter in the Dáil with the Minister. One of the concerns related to the physical infrastructure in the emergency department, ED. The Minister accepted that the emergency department in Galway is simply not up to scratch. I am aware he will do his very best to get the hospital on the capital plan.

Another issue I raised with the Minister that has been put forward by the nurses as a practical solution is that they would really like to get an independent person from outside University Hospital Galway who could examine the way in which the ED works; whether they are doing triage right and if they have the correct ratio of nursing care assistants to nurses in order to put in place a temporary plan they could buy into to get them over the hump before they are in the position of having a new emergency department at which time more medium and longer term measures could be taken on board.

Among the nurses to whom I spoke, some are coping well who have been working in the system for a very long time and they are hardened, but others are broken by the system and what they see when they go into emergency departments because of the empathy and sympathy they feel for people who are on trolleys, some of whom are terminally ill or otherwise extremely ill and have worried families around them. The former CEO of the Saolta University Health Care Group said they were not offering dignity to their patients. That is not something we can allow to continue. If we can do things in the interim such as exhausting the panel of nurses that have been identified and bring in external people to see what we can do in a cost effective way in order to do something different, then we should do so now.

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