Since I came into this House, I have tried to do certain things behind closed doors and I found it quite effective. An issue has come up in the west of Ireland with regard to the ambulance service that is not being resolved. The front page of our local newspaper carries a story about a man in his mid-80s who had symptoms pointing towards a stroke or a bleed on the brain. He was in the doctor's surgery locally and had to wait nearly four hours for the ambulance to arrive after repeated attempts by the doctor and the doctor's staff. The doctor's staff insisted that he needed to go by ambulance to a hospital. I live in Roscommon, where most people are one hour from our nearest hospital, be it Castlebar, Sligo or Galway, so time is of the essence. The gentleman is now home and in recovery. It will be a long road. The family is very disturbed and hope no other family will have to go through what it had to go through. There is an older demographic in my part of the country - one of the oldest in the country. I would hate to think that there is some sort of algorithm that is sorting out patients based on who might be most likely to have a better outcome.

The health forum last week listened to ambulance figures for October and January. Between October and January, there were 24,712 calls to the National Ambulance Service, of which 390 were classified purple, which was life-threatening. The service is looking to get 75% of them addressed within 19 minutes. That is the target time. In October, 78% hit that target time; in November, 66% hit the target time; in December, 63% hit that target time; and in January, 61% hit that target time. It is a trend I do not want to see and one we need to address and it is a conversation we need to have in this House.