Political row raging over Mayo ambulance and healthcare crisis
A Mayo TD has confronted the Taoiseach over the crisis facing ambulance and healthcare services in the county.
Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh said the current situation is dire and unsustainable, and called for urgent intervention Taoiseach Micheál Martin and the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill to lead a coordinated government response to improve the overall provision of ambulance services for communities.
She elaborated: "There are not enough staffed ambulance crews covering the region and the crews that are on the road are under-resourced and arriving at overcrowded emergency departments that do not have the staff or capacity to accept new patients."
Tackling the Taoiseach directly, Conway-Walsh said the situation facing patients and frontline emergency staff has reached a critical point.
“I want to commend in the strongest possible terms the dedicated work of the ambulance services and hospital staff who have collectively saved the lives of countless loved ones, but they are working under huge stress in a broken system.
“The lack of ambulance services, particularly in North Mayo, is a dire situation that I have never seen as bad in all my time as a public representative, where people cannot get an ambulance on time.
“Too many people in life-threatening situations are finding themselves in the horrific scenario whereby they cannot be told when an ambulance is going to arrive, with some patients left waiting hours.
"Others have taken it upon themselves to travel 50 miles on very bad roads to get to the nearest hospital when an ambulance didn’t arrive.
“For those who have managed to get in an ambulance, they are being brought to overcrowded emergency departments that do not have adequate staffing or the bed capacity to accept them.
"We cannot have a situation whereby ambulances are effectively being taken off the road to be used as overflow capacity for hospitals.
“That is why I asked the Taoiseach directly if he knew how many lives have been cut short as a result of ambulances being unavailable to respond to emergencies on time."
Deputy Conway-Walsh stressed that simply allocating funding for additional ambulances, without addressing the wider failures in the health and social care system, will not resolve the crisis.
“Providing additional funding for more ambulances only for them to be left queueing at overcrowded emergency departments is not the answer either.
"This is not an ambulance-only problem, it is a system-wide failure that requires a coordinated government response to tackle the bottlenecks preventing patients from moving through the health system.
“In addition to more ambulance crews, we need serious investment in step-down beds, homecare packages and community supports, so that patients who are medically fit for discharge can leave hospital safely and quickly.
"This would immediately free up hospital beds, reduce emergency department overcrowding, and allow ambulances to get back on the road.
“This crisis demands coordinated, cross-departmental action from government before more families are left devastated by the avoidable loss of their loved ones. Lives depend on it.”