Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending. I sit on the Joint Committee on Health whose members are contacted daily, via the committee and by personal email, about issues that have all contributed to the latest hospital overcrowding and the crisis in workforce planning. I have seen vacancies at consultant level, eye-watering waiting lists and so forth.

My colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, our party spokesperson on health, outlined his concerns around community care options and what we have available. I agree that people need real community care alternatives to hospital emergency departments, which is part of the overcrowding crisis. There is a lack of options. There needs to be stronger co-ordination between community care facilities in hospitals to ensure step-down beds are available to communities for speedy discharges. We hear all the time about people waiting in beds because they have nowhere else to go while others are waiting to get into those beds, and that home health needs to be readily available for people.

We also hear every day about the impact of this crisis, not only on patients but also on staff. Nurses and midwives are being pushed to the brink. Paramedics dealing with a huge upsurge in demand are at breaking point. They are literally sitting outside hospitals in their ambulances, as in the case of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, because they cannot get the patients into the hospitals. Tens of thousands of health workers are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout. It is safe to say the public is losing confidence in our health service. It is alarming that we are expecting more shameful records to be broken next week. The HSE has a duty to provide a safe environment for all health workers and patients but that is not happening in the vast majority of hospitals. This is causing real serious damage to workers' physical and mental health.

To jump across to the other side of the country, my party colleague, Councillor Conor Sheehan, who is a representative for Limerick City North, has also spoken about the severe lack of resourcing in University Hospital Limerick, UHL. That has been highlighted for a number of years by many Members of this House and the Lower House. We have seen figures suggesting that UHL is possibly 50% more overcrowded than other hospitals in the country. My party colleague believes that when St. John's Hospital, Nenagh General Hospital and Ennis General Hospital were downgraded, UHL never got its fair share of resources to create the centre of excellence that was promised. UHL is understaffed and has fewer beds per capitain comparison with the five other acute hospitals.

Three years ago, it was clearly shown by the then clinical director, Dr. Gerry Burke, that the University of Limerick Hospitals Group was poorly resourced in comparison with the six other groups. At that time, the disparity amounted to a 10% deficit in annual funding, with very large disparities in staffing, particularly medical staffing and health and social care professionals, and a large disparity in acute beds. Dr. Burke indicated that more than 200 additional beds were needed and that view was backed up by Professor Lenehan, the current clinical director. Dr. Burke's research showed that, on average, the five other hospital groups in Ireland had up to 25% more hospital doctors, 27% more consultants, 50% more healthcare professionals, HCP, and 7% more nurses and midwives compared with UL Hospitals Group. The group needed 130 more doctors, 120 nurses and 200 HCPs to bring it up to the same level as the other five hospital groups. It is a dire situation at UHL at the moment and very little has been done to correct these anomalies. It is important to recognise that there is a staffing deficit in UHL. Many people working in the hospital feel they are being gaslit to some extent by the suggestion that the situation is not too bad.

I need only refer to my home area, between Meath and Drogheda, to highlight the impact of overcrowding even further. My Labour Party colleague, Councillor Elaine McGinty, who is based in Laytown-Bettystown in County Meath and who has been a very loud advocate for the Save Navan Hospital campaign, was this weekend out protesting the closure of the Navan Hospital accident and emergency department, which plans to send patients over to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. I have already spoken about the ambulance queues outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My Labour Party colleague, Deputy Ged Nash - I have mentioned a lot of party colleagues - spoke about the scenes of chaos outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital when 11 ambulances were parked up at one point on a particular Saturday night. Ill patients were being treated in ambulances because of a lack of beds and trolleys in the hospital. It is very hard for people to understand that. The Minister must understand that people in counties Cavan and Meath cannot contemplate the accident and emergency department being closed when there are queues of ambulances outside the accident and emergency department to which they are going to be sent. I understand that there are concerns around overcrowding in the accident and emergency department in Navan Hospital. This comes down to whether it is better to be in the overcrowded emergency department in Navan Hospital or to be on the road outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. That is a dire situation for our health service to be in.

I wanted to outline to the Minister some of the areas my Labour Party colleagues have been working on and highlighting in recent weeks and draw to his attention, as I am sure he already knows, the overcrowding in hospitals across the country.