Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am conscious that I am sitting beside a colleague and a friend, the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, who knows all too well how that life-saving service made a massive difference to her own daughter, Tara’s life. This is a service that everyone in Ireland really values. It does absolutely incredible work. We live in a country that is small in geographic size but is in someway vast in terms of the remote ways in which our emergency services endeavour to respond to people in real time at a time we know both response times and the clinical competencies at the scene can make an absolutely incredible difference to the clinical outcomes and, indeed, the life of an individual. I am really pleased that this is an issue that is being taken very seriously by the health service and NAS. I am really encouraged, on foot of inquiring into this, to find out about this new feasibility study where physicians will be crewing the HEMS aircraft from next month for a four months and there will be rotation and an opportunity to learn from that. It is not just a trial to see if there is benefit to doing this but more specifically to identify the clinical competencies going forward. I look forward to taking the meeting with the physicians and thank them for reaching out.

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