Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also want to raise UHL but want to do so in a different context. Colleagues may be aware that today a new record has been broken. Nationally, we have 669 people on trolleys, including 28 children, without a hospital bed. Given that this is 25 October, God knows where we will be in another month or in December. As usual, UHL tops the list, with 80 patients on trolleys today. There were 86 patients on trolleys there yesterday. The hospital has apologised as usual and has advised people not to attend there if at all possible. I do not know how people are supposed to react to that. Frankly, people are afraid to go to the emergency department anyway.

I want to quote from a letter written by a doctor in UHL to a senior consultant, in which he explained how on one night in UHL, 20 patients had been at the hospital for 16 hour without having blood taken, any monitoring of their vital signs, or being given essential medications or fluids. He said that staff at the hospital were "grossly overwhelmed" and were using "extremely dangerous practices". He said that triage nurses were being inundated. “We had no idea what was in that box [patient list], nor did we know what was missed over the course of the night ... This thought follows me home and I can only hope that this mess has not led directly to the deterioration or death of a patient.” Patient's lives are most certainly at risk.

For 12 years, the crisis in our hospitals has gotten worse and worse under both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. I cannot count the number of times I have asked for fundamental change at UHL and yet it continues to be ignored. Now we are facing into another stark winter. We have been told that additional beds will be provided in 18 months' time but even after those beds come on stream, according to the manager of UHL, the hospital will still be 87 beds short. This is a failure of planning and of staff retention and recruitment. I have been told that there is now a crisis in University Maternity Hospital Limerick too. We do not have enough midwives and mothers are being sent home early. That is how bad it is there. How long more will this crisis have to go on before we have fundamental change? I am asking for an urgent debate because the people of Limerick should not have to put up with this for one day longer.