Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to share my time, although it will curtail my speech significantly, which the Acting Chair will be happy to hear.

The Labour Party fully supports the motion. There is no question about that. I will speak specifically about Mallow General Hospital because the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, referred to it. The Minister of State noted in respect of Mallow that there is now a collaboration between hospital groups and the National Ambulance service. She continued:

This project was trialled in north Cork and Mallow General Hospital in 2022 and has been rolled out to additional medical assessment units, MAUs, in Ennis, Roscommon and Nenagh. This approach aims to reduce patient presentations at emergency departments and will release ambulances more quickly to respond to other emergency calls. It also allows patients to access an appropriate level of care closer to the home. I expect this service to be expanded later this year to other locations.

I submitted a parliamentary question, the exact wording of which was to ask the Minister for Health about the status of the project for paramedics to treat patients in Mallow General Hospital, the number participating in the project to date, and the funding allocated to the pilot project. The response I received from the national director of the National Ambulance Service on 9 February of this year was that the South/Southwest Hospital Group and the National Ambulance Service jointly implemented a referral pathway - that is the key phrase here - for clinically appropriate patients to the medical assessment unit in Mallow on a pilot basis. The response further stated that the outcome of the initial pilot, which was conducted over a three-month period, demonstrated the safety of this pathway model for patients and the model was therefore expected to continue into the future.

That response is too vague for me. We need further specifics on what this pilot actually means and what metrics have been yielded up in response to this three-month pilot. If this is being lauded as a solution to the trolley crisis and the ambulance crisis, what we need are clear data on how effective that has been. The lack of information in the response to my parliamentary question suggests to me that there was a little bit of optics in this exercise and perhaps not a whole pile of substance. What we need to hear from the Ministers and the Government is how this project will be rolled out because it could have a significant impact on level 2 hospitals such as Mallow, Ennis and Roscommon in terms of ensuring inter-hospital ambulatory care is provided and that people who have been in the hospital system do not have to queue and go back in through the accident and emergency department if there is a clear pathway for them to come back to the level 2 hospital they were being treated in already. That would clearly have an impact on numbers but I suspect the lack of substance in the response to the parliamentary question indicates this is only an optics exercise. I want to hear more from the National Ambulance Service. It is insufficient and disgraceful that the NAS should respond in this way to a Member of the Oireachtas who submits parliamentary questions seeking detailed information of this nature.

A second issue arises from a different parliamentary question. How many minutes do I have left?

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