Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to protest at the outset, and no harm to the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, about the fact that the Minister, Deputy Harris, has not come into the House to take this Topical Issue. Members do not get many opportunities to make a case on significant issues of health in their own counties and when they do, they like to ask questions and tease out issues. The Minister of State, Deputy McGrath, however, will only be able to read a script on this issue. That is not good enough.

Eighteen thousand patients visited the emergency department in Navan hospital in the past year, with 5,500 of those staying overnight in the medical unit in the hospital. Those figures are increasing. Our hospital is a great hospital and we have great staff in Meath. It has proven to be successful in reducing the length of time patients have to stay in the hospital and it has also been successful in reducing the level of readmissions to our hospital. It is one of the best hospitals in the country for dealing with people who have had heart attacks and strokes. It has also taken on a massive amount of new elective surgery from the Mater Hospital.

The hospital serves the whole of the county of Meath, which has a population that is growing radically. When I was a child, approximately 100,000 people lived in County Meath. There are now 200,000 of us and quarter of a million people will be living in the county within the next 20 years, making it one of the most populous counties in the country by far.

Not all the news is good, however. Last September, we saw the near collapse of the accident and emergency department in County Meath due to unofficial industrial action by agency doctors. Navan is more exposed than any other hospital to agency doctors and to this type of strike action because all of the doctors in the accident and emergency department are agency doctors. That means that the HSE does not want to give a full, decent contract to doctors working in the accident and emergency department in Navan because it does not expect there to be an accident and emergency department in Navan for long. Also, I have asked the Minister, Deputy Harris, a number of times by way of parliamentary questions the number of agency doctors and other agency staff working within the health service and I have been told by his Department that it does not know, which is a shocking indictment in terms of the way that service is being currently managed.

Navan used to have a great record with regard to trolley counts. It used to have one of the lowest trolley counts in the country. From January to the beginning of November this year, more than 2,200 people have been on trolleys in Navan. The numbers on trolleys have quadrupled in the space of one year. Why has that happened? Why is it the case that there are four times more people on trolleys so far this year than in the entirety of last year? What does the Minister of State intend to do about that? If a situation arises where there are delayed diagnoses there will be delayed treatment and if there is delayed treatment, there will be sub-optimum outcomes for patients, which is not good enough. I imagine one of the reasons for that is the fact that on a given day this year there were 20 people in Navan hospital who were clinically discharged, that is, 20 people for whom the doctors could do no more but who had nowhere else to go within the health service. Their pathway to further treatment was blocked. There are two State nursing homes in Meath and both of them have equally as many people waiting to get into them as are residents. It means that many people are in hospital beds in Navan because they have nowhere else to go. That is reducing the opportunity for people to access decent accident and emergency health services in County Meath.

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