Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will outline the integrated winter plan for Letterkenny University Hospital that will be delivered by its action team. The membership of the team includes the CEO of Saolta University Health Care Group, the CEO of the RCSI hospital group, the chief officer of CHO 1 and the CEO of Letterkenny University Hospital. I believe the people involved in ensuring that the winter plan works for this region have a vested interest in the region. Specific funding has been allocated to the winter action teams to support the initiatives at local level. The initiatives for this area include the reablement programme to assist in reducing presentations and admissions and additional medical registrars, who are senior decision makers.

Therefore, the extra staff the Deputy pointed out are needed will be put in place. There will be additional aids and appliances to facilitate the discharge of people when they need to be discharged, as opposed to keeping them in hospital when they should not be there, and additional rapid flu testing kits and local PCR flu testing to reduce the length of stays, facilitate diagnosis and treatment of flu patients to reduce isolation demand, and reduce the impact of the outbreaks we know are going to come. We will also reduce patient experience times and trolley numbers through a speedier turnaround of the beds and management of infection control by providing additional cleaning hours.

All of that, while it does not directly impact what happened in this tragedy, has a knock-on effect as to when ambulances arrive. If there is nobody to take the people presenting in those ambulances into the hospitals, obviously, that is where the backlog arises. While I cannot give the Deputy a personal guarantee that it will not happen, I hope the initiatives we are putting in place can ensure that no other family has to go through what the Callaghan family are going through.

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