David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I spoke to hospital management early this morning to be assured that whatever can be done is being done. The manager I spoke to said the serious incident management team has been in place for some weeks. She also said the transfer of samples to other laboratories is not happening at the pace promised and that the hospital has directly asked the two CEOs of the hospital groups, because St. Luke's, Kilkenny, is in the Ireland East Hospital Group and University Hospital Waterford and Tipperary hospital are in the South/Southwest Hospital Group, for a histopathologist to be brought on site in Waterford as a stopgap solution to deal with this problem. She says that has not happened and that, as a consequence, the waiting times and number of samples are still unacceptably high. I have accepted that these are routine samples. Nobody wants to raise alarm but hospital management has also told me that there is a risk of cancer in some of the samples. We need to get them processed and each patient needs to be assured his or her sample will be processed as soon as possible. On the one hand, the Government must consider the issue of transfer, which is not happening at pace, and, on the other hand, the bringing of others on site to help with the backlog.

See this speech in context