Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are day hospital services in Wexford, as the Minister of State has listed, but they are closed after 5 o'clock in the evening. To gain access to those services people need a referral letter from their general practitioner. What is a family supposed to do if a family member is in acute crisis and suicidal? The person has to go to an accident and emergency department and sit in a corridor or on a trolley waiting to be accessed. As there is no consultant psychiatrist in Wexford General Hospital, the psychiatric liaison nurse will have to ring Waterford hospital to consult a psychiatrist there. If it is decided that the person in crisis needs to go to an acute bed in Waterford, they are sent off and will have to go through the accident and emergency department in that hospital also. Therefore, a Wexford patient will have to go through two accident and emergency departments. It has happened in the past that people sent to Waterford hospital from Wexford General Hospital were sent home, having travelling all the way there while in acute distress. It is all a bit mad. It is not a good service.

Back in 2009, Susan Lynch, the HSE manager of mental health and elderly services, said that an acute ward in Wexford General Hospital was more than a proposal, that it was in the HSE's south capital plan, but it never happened. It fell off the lorry. Why did it not happen?

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