David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It takes a bit of a brass neck to deliver the speech that the Minister for Health delivered earlier today. It is so full of inaccuracies and mistruths, it is hard to know where to start. I will start with the first one, where he said that the Sinn Féin motion would have you believe that our NAS professionals are failing in their job. In fact, the very first line of our motion "commends the tireless work of front-line paramedics and operational staff in dealing with increased demand without proportional resource increases". Last week, senior personnel of the NAS and Dublin Fire Brigade told the Joint Committee on Health that demand is outpacing supply in terms of ambulance capacity, and that people are waiting longer for ambulances for emergency and non-emergency call outs.

The second mistruth in the Minister's written statement, which he read into the record of the Dáil, is that response times are improving. I do not know what planet the Minister is on, but I will list the response times again in the Minister's absence and let them ring loud in his ears, because he really needs to take his head out of the sand when it comes to the NAS.

I am talking about the life-threatening calls, the echo and the delta calls. Let us compare them from 2019 to 2022 and for each region. In the east region, in 2019, the average response time for life-threatening call-outs was 15 minutes; in 2022 it was 22 minutes, an increase of seven minutes or 47%. In the midlands, in 2019, it was 19 minutes; in 2022 it was 29 minutes, an increase of ten minutes or 53%. In the mid-west, in 2019, it was 16 minutes; in 2022 it was 25 minutes, an increase of nine minutes or 56%. In the north east it was 18 minutes in 2019; in 2022 it was 26 minutes, an increase of eight minutes or 44%. In the north west it was 18 minutes in 2019; in 2022 it was 22 minutes, an increase of four minutes or 22%. In the south east, where I come from, in 2019, it was 21 minutes; the south east now has the highest wait time of 33 minutes, despite the fact that we do not have emergency cardiac services operating on a 24-7 basis, as the Minister of State will know. That is an increase of 12 minutes or 57%. In the southern region the average wait time for life-threatening calls in 2019 was 18 minutes; in 2022 it was 31 minutes, an increase of 13 minutes or 72%. In the west it was 19 minutes on average in 2019; in 2022 it was 26 minutes, an increase of seven minutes or 37%. Those are all figures produced by the Minister in response to a parliamentary question. Then, when we look at the percentage of calls which were responded to in the 19-minute timeframe for both echo and delta, we see a decrease year on year from 2019.

How, then, can the Minister say in his scripted speech this evening that response times are improving? Improving from when, exactly? The evidence is there in the data which are presented to us from the National Ambulance Service and the Dublin Fire Brigade. In fact, the Dublin Fire Brigade told the Oireachtas health committee that in 2020 the average hospital turnaround time in Dublin for patients being offloaded from an ambulance into a hospital was 29 minutes, with 6% of ambulances experiencing offload delays in excess of 60 minutes. In 2022 the average offload or hospital turnaround time in Dublin was 39 minutes - it went from 29 minutes to 39 minutes - with 16% of incidents having a turnaround time in excess of 16 minutes.

We are getting data from the HSE, from the National Ambulance Service and from the Dublin Fire Brigade all telling us that the wait times are going in the wrong direction, and we have a Minister for Health who has his head in the sand and who comes in here, does not address any of the issues, does not give us any sense that there is any urgency, attacks Sinn Féin and the Opposition for tabling a motion which sets out the facts and, it strikes me, is going to go off, as he always does, with his head in the sand and do absolutely nothing. As Deputy O'Reilly said, he is not fooling anybody. He most certainly is not fooling patients, who are waiting longer for ambulances. He most certainly is not fooling those ambulance paramedics whom we praised in our motion, rightly so, for the work they do, and they are doing it on the back of huge pressures and overtime. Some in the Dublin Fire Brigade had to wait, and some are still waiting, for their pandemic bonus payments, another slap in the face they were given by the same Minister for Health. His speech today was absolutely appalling and shameful, and he should come back and correct the record of the Dáil for some of the inaccuracies and, I would argue, mistruths that were in his statement this evening.

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