Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sure the Minister of State will be able to find the answer for me. I am grateful for his statement and for the previous briefing I received from experts in the field. Hidden in the Minister of State's statement is Civil Service-speak for box-ticking and ensuring that benchmarks are reached. When average call-out times are referred to, what is really meant is that a person will be seen by a paramedic or a trained professional. What is not said is that it will not be by a person in an ambulance. It can be half an hour or an hour before emergency medical personnel arrive at a location in some parts of Kerry. When they get to the scene, it will be in an ambulance car. A person might need to be transported, at which point an ambulance will have to be called for. This means more time is lost. Any doctor will tell one that the more time lost in the case of a critical patient, the poorer the outcome.

I loved the reference - it has got to be great - in the Minister of State's speech to on-call risk assessment with regard to where ambulances will be placed. This implies that the HSE has a crystal ball and knows where people will have heart attacks and strokes around south Kerry. It has a risk assessment that tells the HSE to have an ambulance sitting at the Healy Pass or near the tunnel in Glengarriff on a Friday night because that is the part of the world where there will be heart attacks and accidents. The predictive needs assessment is what is being talked about. The HSE is predicting where accidents will occur and will locate ambulances there on Friday and Saturday nights or Sundays between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

I see that we will be told before the final service model is implemented but we are not being told what the range of options is. What we will get from the HSE is a briefing when the new service is about to be implemented but nothing about the practicalities on the ground or the effect it will have on people. The HSE is trying to say it will have an ambulance on call, but it will be an ambulance car, which is no good to a person who is lying on the side of the road in Sneem, Cahersiveen or Killarney while the ambulance he or she actually needs has gone somewhere else. That is what we are talking about. People are going to die because we are taking away the 24/7 front-line service provided by the people who were protesting this week in Tallaght. People are going to die as a result of the withdrawal of the ambulance service in south Kerry.