Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for making herself available for this issue. We are talking about the day hospital services for mental health in Navan, which as Deputy O'Rourke has said, provided group therapy, individual therapy, assessments, and a clozapine clinic. Unfortunately, only part of this is happening at this point in time. Before March 2020, this was happening properly and was fully functional. The fact is that we did not have the same pressure then in Meath as those on the services at the department of psychiatry in Crosslanes, which is under severe pressure. Louth and Meath have very low provision of beds. I am led to believe that it is around 14.2 beds per 100,000 people. The State average is in the 20s and the EUROSTAT average in 2018 was 34 beds per hundred thousand. It is very far from the number in Germany which is 128 beds per 100,000 or in Belgium at 135 beds per 100,000 people. We do not have the service that is required.

I have particular issues around the protocols and resources for the Drogheda department of psychiatry at Crosslanes. We had a service that was working and, to a degree, was replacing the need for people to possibly go into hospital. This is not the case. We have had a building that was handed over for Covid around March 2020. It was sought back around August and a promise was made of a modular build. That modular build later became a block build and it was delivered late in 2021. There was a fire in the old part of the hospital and the two parts that have been given to mental health services are not fit for purpose. Electricity is not working and there is no heating. The clozapine clinic for people who are treatment resistant is operating as a clinic in the cold and they are incredibly worried.

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