Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There are more than 880,000 patients on hospital waiting lists. Records are being broken every year for the number of patients left on trolleys. Average waiting times in some emergency departments have reached over 27 hours. Some 9,000 people every month leave emergency departments without even being seen. These figures do not do justice to the hardship and turmoil this has caused patients and staff. Mayo University Hospital has one of the worse ambulance turnaround times in the State. Half of all the ambulances there are taking more than an hour to reach patients. This is being driven by the lack of capacity as well as the lack of home help and community beds. There were 22 people lined along corridors on just one night in July in Mayo University Hospital. Numerous times this year, the hospital has put out warnings about visiting the emergency department due to overcrowding. Some 10,027 people are waiting to see a consultant at Mayo University Hospital and 1,365 patients are still waiting for surgical procedures.

Despite the scale of the crisis, the Government decided to stop investing in health and people keep asking why this is. They cannot make sense of it. The head of the HSE said unless he makes cuts, there will be a guaranteed deficit in the health budget. The people of Mayo are absolutely shocked to see the Government throw in the towel on health. When access to healthcare is getting harder and harder, the Government chooses to stop investing.

There are two long-awaited projects in Ballina and Belmullet in County Mayo that cannot be abandoned. These projects are desperately needed and must go ahead. The real impact on people is sometimes lost in the debate. I have been trying to help a woman of 62 to access neurological care for over a year. Her family wrote to the Minister before the budget. She went to her GP with memory loss in June 2022. Despite the fear and the anguish of her family, she was left waiting for months. Her condition deteriorated rapidly. She eventually was sent to Dublin for two weeks. It took almost a year to get a diagnosis of dementia syndrome. Since then, she has struggled to get access to any form of treatment and now she is told by neurology in Galway that the waiting time for urgent cases is ten to 14 months. That is for urgent cases; I hate to think of the time if she was not an urgent case. The Government has abandoned this woman and her family just as they have abandoned so many other people in Mayo and across the State. There is no point in Government Deputies coming to the House to give out about it; they are part of the problem.

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