Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is obvious that we need an urgent review of ambulance resources and the configuration to ensure the emergency service is adequately resourced and run efficiently and effectively. I acknowledge the trojan work of the dedicated paramedics and other emergency staff. I have seen at first hand their absolute dedication. They deserve much better than what they are being presented with. We are talking about protecting and saving lives and retaining, supporting and protecting ambulance workers – workers who are burnt out from long, exhausting shifts. How can the Minister stand over an emergency service that is constructed and resourced in a way that means seriously ill patients must wait up to two and a half hours for an ambulance? The bottom line is that we need to stop the criss-crossing of ambulances, whereby they are travelling hundreds of kilometres, by expanding our ambulance fleet and ensuring rural communities are served properly.

Yesterday I joined the nurses outside Mayo University Hospital when they were protesting over conditions and safety. Their main concern was the safety of patients and staff. That should concern the Minister, and it should certainly concern us all. I hear accounts of routine delays in offloading patients at emergency departments due to a lack of capacity. The nurses have raised the issue of the severe lack of nursing staff to take over the care of patients from the ambulance personnel. This is the problem arising. Right now in Mayo, the nurse–patient ratio can be as high as 1: 15, instead of 1:7, due to the shortage of staff there. The problem is that ambulances are lined up outside the hospital. Two weeks ago I spoke to the family of an 85-year-old woman, a cancer patient, who had to wait outside Mayo University Hospital for over six hours without morphine on her referral by Westdoc.

It should be much easier for UK-trained paramedics to transfer their registrations so they can work in Ireland. They tell me it is easier for them to go to Australia than to come back to their own country. We need to address the crisis in the National Ambulance Service and, indeed, the wider health service.

On the roll-out of the booster vaccine, particularly to those for whom it is now being rolled out, will the National Ambulance Service be doing what it did on the last occasion? What is the timeline for that? When will housebound people in their eighties and nineties get the booster vaccine? Will it be through the National Ambulance Service?

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