Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

People have rightly illustrated the number of different facets of this problem, whether delays in discharging patients, the home help service, the fair deal scheme and so forth. I would like to raise a number of issues specific to University Hospital Galway and the accident and emergency department there. The good news is that additional capacity will come on stream over the next year to 18 months as an extension is built, but we are looking at an immediate problem with the temporary loss of bed capacity which needs to be dealt with.

There are three issues which really affect, and which are somewhat unique to, the emergency department in University Hospital Galway, including the staffing level. The management have acknowledged, and the nurses say, that there is a staffing shortage in the hospital. There was a commitment to hire a large number of nurses to help deal with the shortage, but that has not fully exhausted the panel that is available and we need to do a lot of work to get that done. The staff-to-patient ratio in University Hospital Galway, which has the second busiest emergency department in the country, is behind other emergency departments, and that is a serious problem. Another issue is the building, the actual physical infrastructure of the emergency department in Galway. The Minister for Health, after a discussion with me, accepted that it is not fit for purpose, is not medically safe and is something over which we cannot stand. We need a commitment in the very near future that, in the HSE five-year capital plan, a new emergency department for University Hospital Galway will be provided. That is not a luxury or something we might do. It simply must be done for the medical needs of the patient.

I welcome the offer the Minister for Health made yesterday when he said that the external hospital review and process improvement group, which is currently in hospitals in Dublin, could be made available to University Hospital Galway to look in its processors and how it deals with the systems in the hospital. It was something the nurses' representatives, who are working so hard and so diligently in the emergency department, have asked for, namely, an external review to get the best possible use out of the resources they have, the unfortunate site and footprint in which they operating and how they can deal with it in the short term to make the best possible use of resources.

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