Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not au faitwith the details of the staffing arrangements for that particular ambulance base and those matters are dealt with by the director of the national ambulance service and his team. Under the Haddington Road agreement, any public servant can be redeployed to a new site within 40 km of a previous base. Those rules apply to all public servants and it certainly would not be possible to make exceptions for any one group or county. That is not being proposed. The base has been renovated and the national ambulance service and I are very keen to get it open. We will do anything we can within the rules to do so.

I echo the Deputy's comments about the air ambulance service, which has been an enormous success. He is absolutely right as in the past, an ambulance would have come to a person's house, picked him or her up and treatment would have started in a local accident and emergency department. Often, a patient had to be transferred to another department, leading to a delay in treatment. Treatment now begins in the back of the ambulance, which would be staffed by paramedics or advanced paramedics. Where needed, a patient may be taken by helicopter to a specialist centre right away, thereby cutting out the kinds of delay that occurred in the past. This is much better for patient survival and mortality rates.

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