Michael Mullins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and compliment her on her work within the Department of Health. I thank my Labour colleagues for tabling this motion and giving us an opportunity to debate this important issue.

We all support the Minister of State in her efforts to secure more investment for mental health services, given the significant increase in mental health problems throughout our country, including the increase in suicide rates.

I come from the town of Ballinasloe which had a large institution that at one time had close to 2,000 patients. I pay tribute to the staff who worked in that hospital over the years. They gave dedicated service, care and love to people in that institution, many of whom should never have been there. Thankfully, today most of those people are happily living in the community and their lives have been enriched as a result. They receive a service from the HSE and its dedicated staff who continue to care for them in the community. Thanks are also due to the enlightened consultants who were attached to that hospital over the years. As a result of following the concept of A Vision for Change, east Galway's mental health services are second to none and the envy of many other parts of the country. Those services include the provision of some acute beds at St. Brigid's Hospital in Ballinasloe.

As the Minister of State knows, the HSE is in the process of reconfiguring services in Roscommon and Galway to improve the community element of the service, which I support. The HSE is proposing to close acute beds in Ballinasloe while keeping beds open in Roscommon. I am concerned because having recently spent €2.8 million creating a state-of-the-art facility in St. Brigid's Hospital, Ballinasloe, the HSE proposes to close it. A scoring system was used by the HSE to decide whether the beds in St. Brigid's or those in Roscommon would remain open. There is grave concern in the community about the credibility of that scoring process.

Roscommon hospital no longer has an accident and emergency unit. It is an 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. hospital which provides a much lower level of acute and chronic care services. On the other hand, Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe provides a 24 hour service with many more consultants working in medicine and surgery. In addition, its consultants specialise in heart disease, diabetes, geriatric care and lung disorders. That range of services is not provided in Roscommon hospital, yet when it came to the score sheet, Roscommon scored ten points and Portiuncula Hospital, which is approximately one mile from the St. Brigid's Hospital campus, scored three. Obviously, the question of being adjacent to a major regional hospital comes into consideration.

On behalf of the community, I am asking the Minister of State to request the HSE to revisit that element of what is proposed in the HSE's plan for community services. There was virtually no difference in the scores of both hospitals in terms of mental health care provision. Those scores are inexplicable as east Galway mental care services have been able to implement substantially the 2006 recommendations on mental health policy in A Vision for Change. The Roscommon mental health service, by comparison, has become more institutional with staff being transferred from the community to the hospital, which is contrary to the direction envisaged in A Vision for Change. This is confirmed by the fact that the Roscommon unit has a higher level of patient admission, approximately 498 per 100,000, whereas St. Brigid's admits 256 per 100,000. It is second only to the Cavan-Monaghan region which is managed by the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. John Owens, who was the author of A Vision for Change.

People in east Galway also want to be assured that the resources required to deliver the promised community service will be made available. They are concerned that vacant posts will not be filled in time to coincide with the closure of beds at St. Brigid's Hospital. The situation is causing much angst in the community. I have attended two large public meetings there recently where the rating system was called into question. If that scoring system is not credible, it undermines the good work the HSE is attempting to do.

I am somewhat critical of the HSE's communications strategy and how this message was delivered in this case. Initially there was a lot of doubt and people got the story incrementally, which caused local concern. The residential beds element of the HSE's proposal should be re-examined. Many professionals in the east Galway mental health services feel that the best facility for the provision of acute beds is the recently refurbished unit at St. Brigid's Hospital.