Séamus Healy (Tipperary, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Connolly for sharing her time with me. I want to specifically address the situation at South Tipperary General Hospital and I appeal to the Minister to give it the urgent and immediate support that it needs. I invite him to visit it to see the excellent work that is going on there. I have raised this issue repeatedly since this Thirty-second Dáil was convened a short period ago. I speak as somebody who knows the hospital intimately. I was the hospital administrator for 21 years. I have been a patient there, my family members have been patients there and I am in the hospital on a regular basis. Only yesterday, I was there as a director of the Friends of South Tipperary General Hospital, which is planning fund-raising efforts to support the hospital.

Today's HIQA report confirms what we have known for some time. South Tipperary General Hospital is a very progressive and successful hospital. It is working well in excess of capacity but it is under-resourced, underfunded and understaffed. To use a colloquialism, the hospital is bursting at its seams. Staff are working above and beyond the call of duty on a daily basis and, indeed, on hourly basis. The hospital is working at about 120% capacity on a daily basis and the medical department, which has 79 beds, is working at somewhere in the region of 150% capacity. That is when 85% capacity would be accepted as full occupancy. Inpatient and outpatient attendances have increase beyond all expectations. There are huge difficulties in the accident and emergency department. The trolley count at the hospital increases all the time. The trolley count for 2011 was 750 but the trolley count now is well in excess of 3,000 and over the last period, on no fewer than five occasions, the hospital has had the highest number of patients on trolleys. I have met patients and have seen patients who were accommodated in the foyer of the hospital near the vending machines, the lifts and the cafe and it was shocking. I have to accept what HIQA has said on that issue but it arises because of underfunding and under-resourcing of the hospital.

South Tipperary General Hospital, effectively, is a regional hospital but it is operating on a completely underfunded and under-resourced basis. The background to that is that about 25% of the budget, approximately €12 million, has been taken out of the budget on an annual basis over the past number of years and we have lost well over 100 staff during that period. We need urgent and immediate action to ensure a quality hospital service for the people of Tipperary. A number of steps need to be taken, both in the short term and in the long term. We need the immediate opening of step-down beds, beds we were promised three years ago. Our Lady's Hospital, Cashel, which is located fewer than 15 miles down the road from this hospital, is a modern hospital, properly refurbished following millions of euro having been spent on it, but its door is locked. That hospital should be opened and beds in it should be made available to support South Tipperary General Hospital. We need additional nursing and support staff at the hospital and we need full-time community intervention teams. We need to put back into the system the help hours that were taken out it during the past number of years. Two million home help hours were taken out of the system during that period, and that is unacceptable. A scanning unit is currently under construction. The first floor of that unit is a shell. We need the Minister and the Department to fund turning that shell into a modern ward with additional beds for the hospital. In the long-term, we need the commencement of the development of phase two the hospital, the modernisation of the old hospital area and the putting in place of proper hospital structure to deliver health services and hospital services for 2016. I hope the Minister will take up my invitation to visit the hospital in the very near future.

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