John Brassil (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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144. To ask the Minister for Health to re-evaluate the way in which the ambulance service is co-ordinated, with a view to delivering the control from a central national centre to regional centres; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [8834/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The National Ambulance Service has undertaken a major programme of reform in recent years, to reconfigure the management and delivery of pre-hospital care services, for a clinically driven, nationally co-ordinated system, supported by improved technology. A core part of this programme has been the rationalisation of the NAS command and control function from local regional centres to one national centre, the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC), operating across two sites in Dublin and Ballyshannon.

The establishment of the NEOC was undertaken in order to ensure that the ambulance service operates as a national fleet, rather than in regional divisions. Staff working in the NEOC operate using an integrated platform which enables them to have sight of every ambulance resource in the country. This means that they can deploy resources accordingly and ensure that the nearest available resource is dispatched to the patient within minutes of receipt of the call. This level of co-ordination and deployment of resources was not possible under the localised regional call centre configuration which existed previously.

The service is moving away from the model of care where services are provided to a local area from a fixed ambulance base located in that area, and moving to a model of strategic deployment, where paramedics and advanced paramedics are deployed in a manner which ensures that practitioners with the appropriate skill level are located strategically to provide optimum cover. Cover is provided across the Southern region from NAS bases in Killarney, Dingle, Listowel, Cahirciveen, Kenmare and Tralee. Resources are deployed to incidents as required in accordance with the system of Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch Protocols and are not confined to a specific geographic area.