Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to raise this issue. I congratulate the Minister, Deputy Harris, on his appointment. It is a challenging brief and this is the first time I have had an opportunity to address him and I wish him well in it.

The report on the future of services at Midlands Regional Hospital, Portlaoise was to be completed last September.

We have waited long and hard for that publication. I believe it was finished months ago, but two weeks after the new Government was formed we were told that a draft report had been completed and sent to senior management at the HSE. General practitioners in and the people of County Laois, public representatives and I are very concerned about this issue, as are people living in surrounding counties, including south Kildare where the Ceann Comhairle lives and from where a lot of people using the hospital come. GPs have been made aware of the contents of the draft report and issued a lengthy response on it. I will not read everything they state, but they make a number of important points. They say it contains proposals to downgrade the hospital and that will exacerbate the negative patient experience in the region and result in needless and untimely deaths. They say there is no capacity to facilitate patients in any other centre. I am abbreviating what they say in the interests of time and because of my voice problem. They say they are receiving letters from hospitals fortnightly telling them not to refer patients to emergency departments because they do not have the capacity to deal with them. They say the plan is reckless in the extreme and shows no regard for patient safety. They outline the knock-on effects on other services at the hospital such as paediatric, maternity and mental health services. There has been a spike in the latter in County Laois. They say the plan will impact on the number presenting with self-harm. They also outline the difficulties regarding the effects on primary care services and say the MIDOC service is overburdened and that they have difficulty in filling shifts.

I have met the GPs many times, individually and collectively, and they are professional and responsible and not prone to exaggerating. I am not exaggerating. I attended the emergency department about six months ago and saw at first hand the pressure that it was under. The people living in County Laois and south Kildare and women from County Offaly who attend the maternity unit see the pressure it is under. I want the Minister to explain this to me and I say it with all sincerity: if the emergency department in Portlaoise is already one of the busiest outside Dublin and the departments in Tullamore and Naas cannot cope with their current workloads, where will the 38,000 or so patients who attend the emergency department in Portlaoise annually go? Is he aware that the ambulance service in the region is stretched to breaking point? How would patients in a critical condition be transferred to other hospitals? This is a point I raised at a meeting with the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Leo Varadkar, with other public representatives last year. I asked him, as I ask the Minister, whether he had spoken to the Minister for Justice and Equality and the Minister for Defence about the cost and the logistics of mobilising police and military convoys to transfer high security prisoners from Portlaoise Prison to hospitals in other counties and Dublin? This is a big issue. As of now they cross the road and there is a secure holding area in the hospital. Protocols are in place and there is very little mobilisation as the hospital is located only a few hundred yards away from the prison. This will be a real problem for the Irish Prison Service, the Department of Defence and the policing service which is already stretched. I put the same issue to the Minister and know that he will have a scripted response written by officials.

I am sorry about the temporary problem with my voice, but I raise this issue out of huge concern. If I was never a public representative or a member of a political party, I would be trying to do something about it. It is a serious issue. This is the second busiest emergency department in Ireland. The Minister is a fresh pair of hands and I really want him to consider this issue. He should not let officials in the HSE lead him by the nose. He should get a grip on the issue.

See this speech in context