Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The chief fire officer for Dublin Fire Brigade told the Joint Committee on Health last week that the combined resources of the NAS and Dublin Fire Brigade cannot meet current ambulance demands in Dublin city and county. I sat through the meeting so I know what he actually said, which seems at odds with what the Minister was saying. You would think that would be a wake-up call for the Government that there is something very wrong with the way it is resourcing our ambulance services. Dublin is a growing and expanding city and we are simply unable to keep up with demand. Ambulances are only able to respond to less than half of non-cardiac life-threatening situations within the target time of 19 minutes. Every minute is vital in these situations. We are failing both the ambulance and fire crews, and the people who need them, by putting them in impossible situations like that.

The health committee was also told about the value of programmes like the pathfinder service, which aims to treat people, and particularly the elderly, in their own homes as a means of keeping them out of hospital in the first instance. That was mentioned by a number of speakers. I fear we are too slow in recognising the value of programmes like that and rolling them out right across the wider health service. I think the Minister of State would probably agree with me on that.

The training sector also needs to see a huge investment as, currently, we are simply not able to get enough newly trained paramedics into the system to cope with the demand and the people who are leaving or retiring. Currently, we are sending paramedics over to Britain for placement, and many of them just do not come back as they are snapped up by the NHS. If we could train more of them at home we might reduce the brain drain.

The logjam in our EDs plays a huge role in the problem. If ambulances are stuck outside hospitals while the staff inside grapple with the overcrowding and the lack of beds, then they are not on the road, heading to where they are needed to actually save lives. We need to see greater investment in training and new vehicles and we need to roll out programmes like the pathfinder service. What we need most from Government is to take the situation seriously before it gets even worse, with the harm and loss of life that we heard about. We are all agreed that we need to do more.

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