Seanad debates

Wednesday, 20 November 2019

Nithe i dtosach suíonna - Commencement Matters

Ambulance Service Provision

10:30 am

Photo of Keith SwanickKeith Swanick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. He is probably aware of the desperate situation regarding ambulance services in rural areas. Councillor Erin McGreehan from Louth recently raised with me the specific issue of ambulances in the Omeath area of north County Louth. At present no ambulances are operating in this district of the county.

It has been revealed that ambulance services in Louth have taken over an hour to respond to emergency call-outs on at least six different occasions in the last year. A freedom of information request has revealed that on one emergency occasion in Louth last year it took an hour and 27 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene. Out of the six occasions where ambulances took more than an hour to respond in the county, waiting times were between an hour 18 minutes and an hour 27 minutes.

This is not to do with trolleys backing up and the dysfunctional situation in our emergency departments. Insufficient resources are being directed towards rural areas. What does the Minister of State plan to do, in a holistic fashion, to deal with this issue and ensure that we can get the ambulances to bring the patients to the hospitals in a timely fashion?

Ambulance turnaround times measure the time interval from ambulance arrival at a hospital to when the crew is ready to accept another call. In a number of hospitals, the emergency departments are completely overcrowded and this will get worse with the winter flu season approaching. This overcrowding contributes significantly to delays in ambulance turnaround. The lack of resources in rural areas is a different problem. We are not dedicating enough resources to rural locations. If we are serious about reducing the turnaround times, it means that we need to reduce the length of time people are spending in our emergency departments. With that in mind the escalating overcrowding in hospitals being reported by the INMO's figures is of particular concern. We have a long way to go in this regard and the failure to recruit more nurses has exacerbated the issue.

I accept that there are challenges in rural areas and that we cannot expect to achieve the same turnaround times as urban areas, but they could be vastly improved. We need to increase the number of ambulances and paramedics, but we also need to support community first responders to help with emergencies in rural areas.

Details released under the Freedom of Information Act show that nationally on 123 occasions this year it has taken an ambulance at least an hour to arrive at a life-threatening emergency. Some 26 of these were in Wexford while the longest response time was in Mayo. I thank the Minister of State for coming to Belmullet to visit the district hospital. While I am talking about Louth today, the Erris Peninsula is as big as the entire county of Louth. He will be very familiar with this from his part of the country. We are fortunate to have an ambulance base in Belmullet, albeit an hour and ten minutes away from Castlebar.

Rural areas need an increased service. We have a great air ambulance that I have used, thankfully infrequently, as a GP in rural Mayo. Increasing the number of community paramedics and first responders would be sensible and pragmatic, and may alleviate some of the problems we have today.

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