Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to address the model 2 hospitals and the part they play in the health service. These are hospitals which do not provide emergency services. Model 2 hospitals resulted from the reconfiguration of the hospital system several years ago into centres of excellence as proclaimed by then Minister for Health, former Deputy Mary Harney, thus taking acute services away from many county and regional hospitals. In return, the model 2 hospitals were to be developed to provide services such as acute medical assessment units, day care services and outpatient services and act as diagnostic centres to include scans in order that patients would access services close to their homes and within their own regions. Model 2 hospitals, therefore, were to provide services that would be complementary to those provided in the regional hospitals and relieve footfall in them, particularly in emergency departments.

The development of hospital groups was to drive this development forward. Model 2 hospitals are being starved of funding, finances and staff, and they are not being supported by both lay and medical management within the hospital groups.

Ennis General Hospital is the only hospital in the Mid West Hospital Group that provides a medical assessment unit service seven days per week, yet the management of the group is proposing to close the unit and reduce the seven-day service to a five-day service. This has much more to do with medical politics than the delivery of care to patients. Effectively, it is a failure of the group to deploy resources properly. Considering that the Mid Western Hospital Group is unable to open its own medical assessment unit on weekdays, not to mind weekends, it defies logic that it would now propose to close the only seven-day medical assessment unit within the region, namely, that in Ennis. This will curtail services within the hospital in Ennis but it will also transfer considerable pressure to the accident and emergency services in Limerick because the patients who would occupy the medical assessment unit beds will now end up in the regional hospital in Limerick. Medical assessment units are part of the integration of the primary and secondary care elements of our health service, and discontinuing them will break that continuity.

Sláintecare addresses these issues and provides solutions. It demands that there be accountability and responsibility for decisions. Decisions should be made not for medical or political reasons but for patient care. Will the Taoiseach ensure that the existing services in Ennis will be maintained on a seven-day basis and that all model 2 hospitals will be expanded to provide medical assessment facilities on a seven-day basis nationally?

See this speech in context