Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle's office for affording me the opportunity to raise this issue which is of the utmost importance to the people of Galway and the broader western region. At University Hospital Galway we are blessed with a team of world-class doctors and health care professionals, but they are struggling beneath the weight of inadequate resources and unmanageable demand. As the Minister of State will be abundantly aware, the hospital is beset with the country's longest waiting list, has the most cancelled procedures and frequently has the most patients on trolleys. In the Minister's defence and that of his predecessors, it is not the case that no money has been made available for capital spending on the hospital in recent years, but in times of scarcity it is equally important to consider how money is spent, as well as how much.

The central government funding invested in capital projects at University Hospital Galway in recent years represented a wasted opportunity. The hospital campus has dated facilities and its capacity to cater for the needs of a growing and ageing population cannot be expanded owing to restrictions on its current site. I will cite two of the most recent capital projects to illustrate this point.

This year will see the opening of a new 75-bed ward block. For some time, this prospect gave people in the hospital's catchment area hope that it would go some way towards alleviating the seemingly perpetual overcrowding crisis. However, it emerged in recent months that there were three wards being closed to make way for the new €18 million block and that there would be no net increase in bed capacity once the block's doors opened. This was confirmed in letters from the chief operations officer to the planning authority, in a letter to me from the hospital's general manager and in briefings by senior management of the group's patient council. A key reason for this is that the additional beds cannot be provided under the terms of the city development plan without creating an equal number of car parking spaces, for which there is no room on the campus.

That brings me to the second capital project. The hospital undertook to build a new two-storey parking facility on the site of an existing car park a few years ago. Remarkably, the project's net impact following completion was that there were 80 fewer spaces. We are building car parks that do not result in the creation of extra parking spaces and ward blocks that do not result in the provision of extra beds.

5 o’clock

We need to stop this, take stock of why this is happening and decide what should happen next.

Given the gravity and scale of the overcrowding crisis at University Hospital Galway, I consider it a shame that scarce resources were poorly utilised on capital projects that would offer no respite from the crisis. It is one thing in the midst of an economic crisis to say there is no money but it is quite another to have the money and waste it in a way that would do anything other than confer the maximum possible benefit on the maximum number of people. That, I fear, is what has come to pass in the two instances I have outlined today.

The present set of circumstances is not tenable. Put simply, the region’s population is going to grow but the hospital’s capacity is going to remain the same. The sooner we realise that a longer-term vision is required in the form of a new facility on the grounds of Merlin Park University Hospital, which is on State-owned land, the sooner we can restore confidence in the fact that the current and future health care needs of the people of the west will be catered for.

Endemic short-termism appears to have overtaken most of the planning on the existing University Hospital Galway site. Bearing in mind the Minister’s vision and the setting up of the all-party Oireachtas committee, of which I am a member, to consider a ten-year plan for the health service, does the Minister of State agree that since University Hospital Galway is the major acute hospital for the west, we now need to grasp the nettle and look at the bigger picture?

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