Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The question of timing is very important, particularly the time patients arrive at a hospital. They can end up with a very long wait until 7 or 7:30 the following morning when the surgical teams come back in. Therefore, if they turn up at 11 p.m., and I have personally experienced this they can either stay until 7 a.m., or they can go home and come back.

In my case, I was in Crumlin, the services were not available. Whether people are in the north west or in Crumlin, they will have the same experience from a paediatric care perspective. The surgical services are available from 7 a.m. If we take out the question of going home and coming back, the services are available from 7 a.m. The only way to remedy that is a different contracting model for consultants and registrars to provide surgical services overnight. On the question of emergency surgery, timeliness really is very important. I do not know what time it was possible to come back to the hospital to avail of that surgery.

The overall question is the availability of surgical services overnight, whether that is in Dublin, Crumlin, the west or the north west. Emergency surgical services are really a matter for the consultant contract. I hope that will improve in the very significant extension of hours that will follow from the consultants’ contracts. I hope that will be of benefit to people who are looking for emergency surgical procedures, because I am not sure that there is a geographic issue here. As I said, I have a very direct personal experience of this in Crumlin hospital and there would not have been any different outcome in terms of timing whether I had been Crumlin or the north west. Whether people stay at home or come back, the service is not available because staff will not be there until 7 a.m. or 7.30 a.m. I am not saying that is good enough, but I am saying that the extension of the contracting hours to up to 80 hours per week over six days should, as I understand it, provide significantly extended hours of operation for the surgical services. That really seems to be what is at issue here.

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