MINISTER FOR Health James Reilly has confirmed he wants to see the emergency department at Roscommon County Hospital replaced with an urgent care centre.
He said this would be staffed by hospital doctors from 8am to 8pm weekdays and outside these hours patients attending the hospital could see GPs.
He did not say when the new arrangement would come into effect but it is expected it will begin on July 11th.
Dr Reilly said the way in which services were structured at Roscommon hospital was “unsafe”. The hospital was accepting heart attack and stroke patients, as well as trauma cases, but it had no facilities to insert stents and no orthopaedic or vascular surgeon.
The hospital was also short of junior doctors, he added.
Overall, across the State there are still 254 junior doctor posts vacant with just over a week to go to July 11th, when these jobs will have to be filled to maintain current services. On that date junior doctors rotate posts as part of their training. Dr Reilly said as doctors were still being recruited he could not confirm at this stage which other smaller hospitals might lose services.
There have been fears that Portlaoise and Loughlinstown hospitals could also lose round-the-clock emergency services as a result of the shortages. Dr Reilly stressed no hospital was going to close.
John McDermott, chairman of the Roscommon Hospital Action Group, said what was now proposed for his local hospital was unacceptable. He pointed out that orthopaedic patients and others needing complex surgery were at present only stabilised in the hospital before being transferred to Galway and the people of Roscommon wanted this to continue.
Having GPs seeing patients at night time, rather than the current position where consultants were on call, would not meet the approval of the local community.
He also said research showed the risk of death for people who are unconscious, not breathing or have chest pain rises by 1 per cent for every 10km travelled.
Therefore if patients had to travel from Roscommon to other hospitals under the new arrangements the risk to their lives increased.
Dr Reilly told the Dáil, however, that the concept of the “golden hour” had been superseded by research that showed the chances of a patient surviving increased by 25 per cent if they went to a high volume hospital, even if they spent an hour-and-a-half getting there.
He said there would be four ambulances on duty in Roscommon during the day and three at night to ensure patients with acute conditions could be taken to other hospitals when the changes came into effect. The urgent care centre will deal with minor injuries.
Dr John Barton, a consultant at Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe – the nearest hospital to Roscommon – and a long-time campaigner against the removal of services from smaller hospitals, said he had huge concerns about what was happening in Roscommon. “It’s different from Ennis and Nenagh, which are much closer to Limerick. It could have very serious implications for the people of Roscommon,” he said.
“There are better models out there that could be worked on . . . it’s crisis management,” he added, referring to the fact that he had been invited to a meeting today to discuss drawing up a protocol for ambulances to bypass Roscommon hospital, something that could have been expected to be prepared earlier.
Meanwhile the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine has said some junior doctors who had been expected to come and work there on July 11th were now pulling out.