Michael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this serious debate. I compliment Deputy Kelleher on bringing it before Dáil Éireann so we can discuss the crisis in accident and emergency departments.

We need to realise there is a very serious issue. We are well served with many fine people working in the health service, but in the part of the country I live in, a decision is made by families before they send elderly people into the emergency department at Cork University Hospital because of the lack of dignity they would face and because they would be waiting for hours. We saw the closure of the emergency department in Mallow hospital, which was a fantastic service for Duhallow, western Duhallow in particular, and places that are more than an hour and ten or 15 minutes from Cork city. I have first-hand experience from my family of the likes of the emergency department in Mallow hospital. Going back a few years ago, I was in an ambulance after a road traffic accident where they diverted the ambulance at the racecourse in Mallow to Mallow hospital instead of Cork. We left the scene of the accident for Cork and had to be diverted because the patient deteriorated. Thankfully they were resuscitated in Mallow and then sent on to Cork. The decisions being made do not reflect the reality on the ground.

There is one issue I want to raise, namely, the ambulance service in the Duhallow region. Every week, somebody rings me about the ambulance service. Last Monday afternoon, I got a phone call from a relative whose family member had gone into an epileptic fit. They had rung for an ambulance and waited 40 or 45 minutes for it, then they rang me out of desperation, not thinking we could wave a magic wand or whatever. The issue was that the ambulance was coming from Tralee because there was no ambulance in Duhallow at that stage, and then through the emergency call centre there was another change and the ambulance came from a different direction. The region of Duhallow is not being well served. There was an ambulance taken out of the Millstreet area with this new configuration of the ambulance service. There was always an ambulance in Macroom, Kanturk, Mallow and Millstreet. That ambulance was covering the Cork-Kerry border and the greater part of Duhallow. It covered 27,000 or 28,000 people. The region itself would be larger than some rural Dáil constituencies. We have no ambulance service there. If an ambulance leaves Kanturk and takes a patient to the CUH or to any other hospital in the city and then there is a call-out to Littleisland or to Cobh or anywhere else, the ambulance is immediately dispatched because this is the nearest ambulance and if there is a call in Kiskeam or Rockchapel or any of those places, there is no ambulance. It will be the Limerick or the Kerry ambulance, which might be an hour or an hour and a half from those places. It is simply not acceptable in this day and age.

We have seen the issues with the new call-out services. That is a concern as well. When people are ringing an ambulance for a family member, they are very distressed. They are very worried and they are asked all these questions. It is fine for somebody to be taking down the details but there needs to be a small bit of human kindness and compassion. Operators must understand that people are very distressed, whether there has been an accident or whatever has happened to cause someone to ring an ambulance.

The basic point is that the removal of the ambulance service from Millstreet has been catastrophic in terms of ensuring an ambulance is available to reach within a reasonable timescale the people in western Duhallow whom I represent. It is a crying shame and I ask the Minister to go back and look at it because it is not acceptable.

Going back to the motion Deputy Kelleher has placed before the House, we saw last week various reports about elderly people waiting on trolleys. There was almost a wringing of hands and an attitude that it was somebody else's fault. There were all kinds of commitments made, going back seven, eight or nearly ten years at this stage, that if certain people were elected, they would get rid of the trolleys and so on. Last week, there was an attitude of, "How dare you bring up the issue of trolleys in the Dáil and how dare you bring the privacy of patients into it?" The dignity of patients is destroyed while they are waiting on trolleys. It is not acceptable to have an elderly person on a trolley having come from their home or sometimes a nursing home because they are ill. It is not acceptable to have them on a trolley for 24 hours or longer. It is very challenging for the patients, their families and any ounce of human dignity to have them in that place.

We all have to ensure that when this debate is over we continue to keep the pressure on, that there is a proper attempt at solving this issue, that we do not just have a vote tonight on the counter-motion and walk our way through it, and that we make a proper attempt to sort it once and for all. I impress upon Dáil Éireann that it is not acceptable what the configuration of the ambulance services has done to my region of Duhallow in taking an ambulance out of Millstreet and leaving the Duhallow region without a service, a region which is an hour, and in some instances over an hour, from any one of the hospitals in Limerick, Cork or Tralee. That is not acceptable and the issue needs to be revisited by the HSE immediately if not sooner.

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