Seanad debates

Wednesday, 8 December 2021

An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business

 

10:30 am

Photo of Paul GavanPaul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have to raise the issue of University Hospital Limerick once again, regrettably. The number on trolleys in the hospital yesterday was 83; on Monday it was 82. Some 3,500 people have been treated on trolleys in the hospital in the past three months alone. A 96-bed unit is planned. From a meeting on Friday, I gather that a tender for that is still open and that the earliest - it is a very optimistic "earliest" - that that 96-bed unit will be ready is July 2023. What are the people of Limerick expected to do in the meantime? This crisis at University Hospital Limerick has been with us for over a decade. It has got progressively worse year after year. I am calling for an urgent debate and an intervention by the Government. There is something fundamentally wrong when things continue to get worse and worse at this hospital. The morale of staff is at an all-time low. People dread the prospect of having to go into the hospital. The chaos there should be thought of in the context of the Omicron variant, God forbid, because we know that the number of Omicron cases is doubling in Britain every day. How on earth is University Hospital Limerick supposed to cope when it has people crowded in hallways day after day, week after week? This has been an ongoing failure - it is Government failure, let me be clear - for over a decade, and something fundamental has to change. In the previous Seanad I called for a ministerial intervention to see what else could be done because right now nothing is being done for people in Limerick. We have the prospect, God forbid, of a really challenging January. The numbers get worse week on week, month on month, and there is no plan that will work that is in place, which is not good enough. We need to see a step change, and it has to come from the Government, to challenge the ongoing crisis in University Hospital Limerick. The people of Limerick have suffered enough. I will finish with the question I asked earlier. What are the people of Limerick expected to do until 2023? By the way, that 96-bed unit represents only 48 new beds. The others are replacement beds. That is only a quarter of what we need. University Hospital Limerick is 200 beds short. After all this investment, we will still be three quarters short of where we need to be. It is a disgraceful record for this Government and preceding Governments.

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