Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

How? Let us discuss Mayo University Hospital. The first thing is in relation to staffing. Mayo hospital has had a 30% increase over the past five years. When I saw some of these figures I did an analysis of a sample of nine model 3 hospitals. Mayo hospital has the second highest rate of staffing of those model 3 hospitals. The difficulty with Mayo hospital is not the level of staffing. I have also included a maternity leave analysis and a sick leave analysis. Mayo hospital is not understaffed. However, Mayo hospital is imbalanced. I will give the Deputy two examples of that. I was there on an unscheduled visit when there were 47 patients in the emergency department. Of those patients, 20 had been admitted for beds, but there was no discharging going on up the hospital. Mayo University Hospital remained red all through August, which is completely unacceptable. Last weekend, there was not sufficient work being done to discharge during the weekend. There were 16 discharges in the hospital on Saturday, there was one on Sunday and there were 47 on Monday. I ask the Deputy to explain that to me. There is not a single person in this room who can explain that except that there is an imbalance in staffing. I was there on a random Saturday in August and the emergency department was absolutely overwhelmed. There was a serious patient safety issue there. The rest of the hospital was completely empty.

There were practically no diagnostics going on. There were not even people in the diagnostics area. The hospital is not understaffed but it has an understaffing area in the emergency department, specifically because it is not being correctly staffed on the other side. I asked Bernard Gloster for an analysis of this and I have the data back. It is my intention this week to write to every TD and councillor in Mayo to specifically outline exactly what the staffing issues are, exactly what the patient flow issues are - which are a whole-of-hospital responsibility - and what we need to do within Mayo to make this better. Let us not confuse ourselves; this is not a staffing issue in Mayo hospital. It has one of the best staffing ratios of all of the model 3 hospitals. What is not happening is that this is not translating from a patient flow perspective into making sure the patients are safe and the staff in the emergency department are appropriately supported to make sure they can do their jobs in the way they need to do them. We will stick with the facts here. It is not understaffed; it needs to be balanced.

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