Joe McHugh (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I wish to highlight the bed shortages and resultant staff problems in Letterkenny General Hospital. While welcoming the announcement of the Minister for Health and Children that there will be an extension, the problem is that the staff and management are between a rock and a hard place. They cannot wait for two to three years for the extension of the accident and emergency unit in Letterkenny and an immediate short-term solution is required. The problems are having negative knock-on consequences for the staff and patients. The patients are not being offered the quality support they could get if there were extra space and there are dignity and privacy issues as they are crammed in close to each other.

I seek the direct intervention of the Minister with the management at Letterkenny General Hospital to come up with a strategic short-term plan to address the problem. A solution may lie in getting some form or pre-fabricated building. We do not want to end up with a problem similar to the recent one in Castlebar that was highlighted by RTE, when a man had to wait three weeks due to problems getting him transported to Dublin. The Irish Nurses Organisation has publicly stated an accident is waiting to happen at Letterkenny General Hospital. That does nothing to improve the morale of staff or uphold the level of patient care.