Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. The reality is there has been a catastrophic failure of the hospital. The situation cannot continue in the current manner. Yesterday I spoke to a woman whose husband is in UHL. After days in the emergency department, ED, he was sent to the ward. The sheets on the bed he was given were filthy. His young son who visited him later left the room because he could not stand the smell. This is simply outrageous. We deserve much better than this. Under the current management, crisis has become normal. The perpetual crisis at the hospital demonstrates that the management team is not up to the task. A new approach and a new team are needed. Patients deserve much better than they are getting. Simple things do not work in the hospital. People do not have blankets when waiting in the emergency department. They are cold and hungry. The toilets quite often are not cleaned properly. These are simple things that can be fixed.

Pandemic bonuses were announced in January and still thousands of workers remain without them. These are people who took the risks in our hospitals when the rest of us were able to shelter at home. I would like to mention one positive note. That is the introduction at the hospital of the pathfinder programme. It is a welcome addition which it is to be hoped will deflect some of the elderly patients away from the ED without compromising their care. This should lead to improvements in waiting times at the emergency department while removing the possibility of infection for those elderly citizens who otherwise would have to sit in the ED waiting room. However, as is always the case in this hospital, it is too little too late when it comes to action and health.

The recent report I referred to earlier commissioned by the UHL group requires a proper Government response. It has detailed what we already knew, namely, that we have an overcrowding and capacity issue at UHL. It is time for the Minister for Health to step up and address the capacity in a much better way than he has been doing up to this. Staffing and management issues at the hospital need to be addressed as well. An additional 48 beds will not solve the problem. We need a minimum of 202 beds. There is no tackling the crisis at UHL unless we get to grips with this, the people of Limerick and the mid-west will continue to suffer in the emergency department due to Government inaction and a failure to act and invest with the proper money, resources and staffing we need.

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