Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Chambers. I will follow up on the figures and how authoritative they are and revert to the Deputy directly.

On a general point, before dealing with the Mayo-specific issue, the national ambulance service received 859 calls per day on average in March. That is 26,629 calls over the full month of March. Of all of those calls we saw 1,668 ambulances delayed for greater than an hour. It is not acceptable that ambulances are delayed for that long, but it gives a sense of the volume of calls that our ambulance service is dealing with, and shows that the overwhelming amount of them are very successful.

However, we do need to do more about this.

I thank the Deputy for acknowledging the difficulty of meeting HIQA response times in certain parts of the country. This is not due to a lack of willingness on the part of the national ambulance service but because of particular geographical challenges which we have to work in innovative ways to overcome.

Staff reports from Mayo University Hospital are accurate and it is true that when an emergency department is congested it results in additionality in terms of time. I thank the staff in the hospital because we have seen an improvement in trolley numbers and on one day this week there was a 46% decrease in patients on trolleys as compared with the same day last year. Ultimately, the issue is bed capacity and we need more beds in our health service. Class sizes have increased as the population has increased but bed capacity has not, and this has been the case over periods of successive Governments. We need to do this collectively and that is why the bed capacity review is under way. I need to have a clear figure for the number of extra beds we need for the health service in time for the mid-term capital review.

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