Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda is under a lot of pressure, as many hospitals around the country are. However, it is a hospital that has improved extraordinarily in the past couple of years and in some ways demonstrates what can be done. If one takes the hospitals in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, RCSI, hospital group together, namely, Beaumont and Drogheda, that used always top the league tables in overcrowding and adds to them Connolly and Cavan hospitals, there are fewer patients on trolleys in that entire region in those four hospitals than in one hospital in Cork or one hospital in Limerick. It shows what can be done to reduce overcrowding with the right resources, as well as good management and good clinical leadership.

I pay tribute to the staff in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, for turning that hospital around in the past couple of years. When I was Minister for Health, it was always at the top of the league table when it came to overcrowding. Beaumont was too. Now they are the least overcrowded hospitals in the country. It shows what can be done. We need now to do that across the board.

As for Dundalk, another very good hospital, it has a great minor injury unit. I would like to see people use it more. I had the pleasure to visit it with the Deputy a number of years ago. However, the best advice that we have from our emergency consultant doctors is that we still have too many, not too few, emergency departments and that if one spreads one's resources and staff more thinly overall, the position will be worse, not better.

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