Martin Daly (Roscommon-Galway, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister of State for her answer. I will deal quickly with the transfer. On the transfer of high-risk cases, there was already a pre-existing system for women who had underlying medical conditions to be transferred either to Galway or to Dublin. The initial suggestion was that all women with diabetes, gestational diabetes or pre-existing diabetes would be transferred. That is not happening now because there is no capacity in UHG. We are either implementing this policy on the basis of safety or we are applying it on the basis of capacity.

The Minister of State raised the issue about women having to travel to Galway. The women who will be most affected by this are the women with the least resources, the women who cannot travel, the women with the least education. There are pockets of severe deprivation around Ballinasloe and the east Galway and south Roscommon area. We will have these ladies not presenting for antenatal care and presenting late at the delivery unit at Portiuncula because that is the closest place to them. They need accessible high-quality and safe care.

We need the recommendations from the Walker report to be implemented. It is clear to me that all the issues around training, communication and governance were promised but they were incompletely or inconsistently applied. We are in denial here. People have told me that the recommendations from the Walker report were implemented when they patently were not implemented. The people in Ballinasloe deserve the implementation of the recommendations from the Walker report and also the implementation of the recommendations of the Coulter Smith report. What is really important and what we are forgetting here is that even with the movement of maybe 200 high-risk cases to University Hospital Galway, given that the diabetic ladies and ladies who developed diabetes during pregnancy are being maintained in Ballinasloe we need a safe high-quality service in the maternity unit in Ballinasloe.

I implore for this to happen because this is not just about management. There are issues around interprofessional and intra-professional relationships within the department which need to be managed very closely because people have a professional responsibility to collaborate to produce a high-quality service.

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