Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. Tá an-áthas orm tacaíocht a thabhairt don rún atá os comhair an tSeanad anocht. Tá an-áthas orm freisin faoin gcur chuige atá ag an Rialtais maidir leis an rún seo. Is maith an rud é go bhfuil an Rialtas ag glacadh i bprionsabal leis an rún. I welcome the Minister of State and I welcome the approach that has been taken by the senior Minister in the Department of Health to this motion. I am glad that he has been so positive towards it because it was put forward in a very constructive manner.

The figures are very stark. Indeed, they are always stark but we have become somewhat immune to them. There were 425 people on trolleys today, 28 of whom are in University Hospital Galway, UHG, my local hospital. These are huge figures but we have become so used to rattling them off that we forget how many people are actually affected. I was in UHG recently and I saw the situation for myself at first hand. The conditions in places like the emergency department are absolutely unbearable. My heart really goes out to all of the clinicians and nurses. The work they are doing is incredible. The same is true of the paramedics who come in with the ambulances and look after people on trolleys.

We have particularly chronic issues in the west when it comes to waiting lists. In UHG we have the longest inpatient and outpatient lists in the country. The figures in UHG are double the nearest other worst-case scenario. We often have the highest number of patients on trolleys and we have a mental health system in the west, which I have raised previously with the Minister of State, that is in absolute chaos. The situation is particularly bad in that area. I have called on numerous occasions, as have other Members of this House, for the Minister to visit the hospital in Galway. He was supposed to visit recently and it is a shame that he did not get there. I hope that he will come soon. There have been calls from across the board for consideration to be given to providing a new hospital in Galway on either a greenfield site or on the Merlin Park site. I do not know which would be best but we must first conduct a feasibility study. Every time I have raised this issue with the Department, it has been shot down and I have been told that the Department will not even bother to look at it but is the least we can do for the region. Galway is providing services for people from Donegal all the way down to Clare, a huge area, as part of the Saolta University Healthcare Group. The least we can do is some kind of feasibility study on the development of a new hospital in Galway which would take some of the pressure off UHG.

We had 12,454 cancelled surgeries in the west last year, across Galway, Mayo, Sligo and Roscommon. In UHG, the figure was 6,194, in Sligo General Hospital it was 1,958, in Portiuncula in Ballinasloe it was 976, while in Roscommon the figure was 815. These figures from the Saolta University Healthcare Group, which covers all of that region, demonstrate that there is an east, west divide when it comes to cancelled surgeries. The main reason for surgery cancellations is capacity constraint. In many cases, our acute hospitals are at 95% and 100% capacity and do not have any spare wriggle room to deal with crises.

There are 42,000 patients on inpatient and outpatient waiting lists in UHG. There are 31,000 on the outpatients list, 4,700 of whom have been waiting over a year. Areas of particular difficulty include orthopaedics, cardiology, dermatology and ear, nose and throat, ENT. The inpatient list at UHG is twice as long as the next worst waiting list in any other hospital and one quarter of the 11,000 people on that list have been waiting for over a year. I must say, having visited the hospital recently, that the front-line staff are absolutely excellent. However, there were a number of practices I noted that are of some concern. I saw people being brought into the emergency department on a Friday evening and being held over a full weekend until Monday because diagnostics or consultants were not available. People were kept for three nights in the hospital which may not have been necessary had tests been done over the weekend. I also noted something quite strange. I saw three security guards on a ward with a number of older people. I wondered if they were expecting a fight but after a while I realised that a number of the patients had either dementia or Alzheimer's disease and had a tendency to wander. Three private security guards were attached to individual patients. What is the cost of that? Would it be not be cheaper to have nurses available to look after such patients? How appropriate is it to have that work carried out by people who do not have training in the area?

I was contacted recently by several health care assistants, HCAs, who were brought in recently and promised that they would have contracts within 18 months. They are still waiting for those contracts but agency workers are being brought in at a much greater cost to the HSE.

The issues around addiction services in the west have not gone away. I have raised them with the Minister of State previously. People who have been looking for alcohol addiction services since before Christmas are being turned away because they have not gotten a dual diagnosis. It is a big problem because these people are ending up in the acute system, taking up beds.

I welcome the fact that the Government is willing to take on board this Sinn Féin motion. I call on Fianna Fáil to withdraw its amendment and, in the spirit of new politics, support what we have promoted.