Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. With the greatest respect to him, as I said earlier, I am deeply disappointed the Minister for Health or a Minister of State from the Department of Health are not here. It is really important and I do not believe the Minister has grasped the severity of the situation in Limerick, which is ongoing. We are facing a crisis. I have been in the hospital recently. The trolleys are smashing off each other because there is no way to get around. The porters there have told me that people who have a need to be resuscitated and are on a hospital trolley in UHL cannot be moved. If the porters are not able to move them people will actually die. They cannot be moved because there are too many people there. The porters are human, and they know these people. Sometimes it is their neighbours or friends, and often it can be family members.

We need some sort of an intervention from the Minister. The people from the mid-west region have not really heard from the Minister on this issue as much as he should be doing. Everybody understands that the capacity issue is a problem. Everybody everybody understands this happens if one merges three hospitals together. We were supposed to end up with a centre of excellence. In 2009, however, we never got the resources or the staffing that we were supposed to get. We are now dealing with the legacy of this. It is all catch-up.

There is stuff we can do in the moment. Some of the Minister of State's colleagues spoke previously about housing adaptation grants. I would bet my house there are people in UHL tonight who cannot leave because a housing adaptation grant has not been approved for them. It is simple stuff. The Minister said he would do whatever he could do, but that proves he will not. There are nursing home problems, there are issues with home care package that are approved but nobody can do them because the Minster will not pay or retain the staff properly.

Nurses, and especially the foreign nurses who come here, are doing a fantastic job. Some of them stay for five years but they are also actively targeted to go back to Australia or different places. Sometimes they are being offered a free car or offered free accommodation. We need to do something to make sure the staff actually stay. It is also well known that we are short 64 non-consultant doctors in UHL. There is no urgency around doing that.

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