Louth hospital pressure
Peter Fitzpatrick welcomed lower MIU fees but argued that pressure on Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital required restoring full services to Louth County Hospital. The Taoiseach said Drogheda was under pressure but had improved greatly and used it as an example of what can be achieved.
I welcome the Minister for Health's announcement that as part of a suite of new measures to alleviate pressure on emergency departments in the country's public acute services, the fees in minor injuries units, MIUs, are to be reduced from €100 to €75. In County Louth, we have Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda which is under severe pressure. The only way to alleviate pressure is to restore the full services to Louth County Hospital. In Dundalk, children and families are passing Louth County Hospital, which had fantastic services but was closed down by the Fianna Fáil Government in 2010. It is time that we reopen and restore all full services to Louth County Hospital.
Comment on this
Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda is under a lot of pressure, as many hospitals around the country are. However, it is a hospital that has improved extraordinarily in the past couple of years and in some ways demonstrates what can be done. If one takes the hospitals in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, RCSI, hospital group together, namely, Beaumont and Drogheda, that used always top the league tables in overcrowding and adds to them Connolly and Cavan hospitals, there are fewer patients on trolleys in that entire region in those four hospitals than in one hospital in Cork or one hospital in Limerick. It shows what can be done to reduce overcrowding with the right resources, as well as good management and good clinical leadership.
I pay tribute to the staff in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, for turning that hospital around in the past couple of years. When I was Minister for Health, it was always at the top of the league table when it came to overcrowding. Beaumont was too. Now they are the least overcrowded hospitals in the country. It shows what can be done. We need now to do that across the board.
As for Dundalk, another very good hospital, it has a great minor injury unit. I would like to see people use it more. I had the pleasure to visit it with the Deputy a number of years ago. However, the best advice that we have from our emergency consultant doctors is that we still have too many, not too few, emergency departments and that if one spreads one's resources and staff more thinly overall, the position will be worse, not better.