Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will be sharing one minute of my time with my colleague, Senator Byrne. This is an all too familiar problem. It is something we - the previous Administration, the ones before, and this Administration - have been dealing with year in, year out. Hundreds of citizens across the country are without hospital beds. Their dignity, as Senator Murnane O'Connor said, is compromised. Staff are working heroically against a backdrop of extremely difficult situations and conditions to do their very best for the patients for whom they care. I have no doubt the Minister is working extremely hard to try to resolve this issue as all of his predecessors have. We all acknowledge that. There is no shortage of sympathy and expressions of regret about the experiences people have in our emergency departments up and down the country. We know the nuts and bolts of this issue are being addressed with additional resources and supports, although they are not growing at the rate we would like.

I can only speak with any great authority about the experience in my local hospital. I reassure my colleague from Limerick city that Limerick is not unique in the problems it experiences. In my local hospital, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, there are 18 patients on trolleys. That is significantly down from the number on equivalent days in recent years. There were 30 people being accommodated on trolleys yesterday.The figures are as I have described. The reasons for that are manifold, but one reason sticks out; the lack of investment in new facilities and in hospital beds. The Government in which I served invested very heavily in expanded services and capacity for Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. The Minister correctly points out that there are now additional acute beds in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and additional beds being made available this year, but that is nowhere close to what is required to address all of the many problems experienced by staff and patients in that hospital. However, this investment has made a very strong contribution towards making the necessary beds available.

However, I need to warn the Minister of something. That investment must be escalated very dramatically and very shortly. It was alarming for the people of Louth and east Meath to read Mr. Martin Wall's recent front page report in The Irish Times. Drawing from documents in the Minister's possession which came from the pen of the director general of the HSE, Mr. Tony O'Brien, it stated that this year alone Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital has an unmet critical need for 82 additional hospital beds and five new theatres.

I want to ask the Minister very clearly whether he will make that investment, which is required for the people of Drogheda, Louth, east Meath, and the communities right across the north east and north County Dublin. Will he make that investment available for Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda this year? As I understand it from the correspondence the Minister has received from the HSE, investment is also required in Beaumont Hospital, facilities in the west of Ireland, Mayo General Hospital, and in the University Hospital Galway dialysis unit. I understand that this investment has been costed at approximately €12 million this year and an additional €30 million euros next year, in order to meet all of those critical needs across our acute hospital service. That also includes five new theatres that are required in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I want to receive a clear response from the Minister on this. Will he make those resources available this year?

Of course, acute hospital beds are not the only dimension that we need to deal with when it comes to the operation of emergency departments in this country. The delays in boosting primary care provision are well known. In 2013, two separate investments were announced in my own community. One of these was the Bettystown Primary Care Centre, intended to accommodate the needs of the people in east Meath. The other investment was in the north side of Drogheda, the area I am from and in which I continue to live. It has taken until 2018 to see the opening of the new primary care centre in north Drogheda. That is four or five years after it was originally announced. Meanwhile, there seems to me to be little sign of the development in Bettystown. This is something I am continuing to pursue with the HSE. We know that investment in primary services addresses some of the issues that we are experiencing day in, day out on a year-round basis in emergency departments across the country.

In addition, in 2013 and 2014 I was central to the repurposing of what was a residential nursing home for older people in the Drogheda area called the Cottage Hospital. That facility was re-purposed and retooled to become a transitional care unit. This was largely to accommodate frail and elderly people who were leaving our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. These patients were no longer acutely ill but required additional supports before they went home into long-term nursing homes. Our ambition was that there would be additional beds available there for older people, to accommodate them in the context of the traditional care service.That was our vision, and the vision of the HSE; to assist Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, and importantly to assist those older people.

There was only a maximum of 24 beds in that particular unit. That simply is not good enough. In addition, the capital plan that was announced at the end of 2015 envisaged a new redeveloped public nursing home service in the Boyne View House facility and the St. Mary's Hospital facility on the Dublin road in Drogheda. The boots were due to be on the ground in that development now. There is no sign of any construction of that particular unit. I use these local examples because the principles apply to the system right across the country. We need investment in primary care, frail elderly programmes, transitional care units and residential nursing home units to take pressure off our emergency departments. Those departments are staffed by people who are working heroically, often against the odds, to provide good services to the people for whom they care.