Sir, – Minister for Health Dr James Reilly has stated that the A&E department of Roscommon hospital is unsafe after 8pm each night from Monday July 11th. He proposes that it will be safer if managed by a GP and a fast ambulance. The current unsafe service has in-house doctors, nurses, consultants on call, intensive care and diagnostic facilities with back-up beds. The safer GP will have worked all day and now will work all night and the next day. He/she will have no diagnostics, no consultant back-up and no training in providing a hospital emergency service in the first place.
My worry is that he/she will share the same medical insurance company as myself. The fast ambulance will have to make the 90-minute journey to the suburbs of Galway city, and it can take a further 90 minutes to get to Galway University Hospital – even when none of the many Galway festivals are on.
Here in Galway my patients plead not to send them to A&E in UCHG where the corridors are lined with trolleys waiting for beds. And we don’t have an air ambulance service do we? Maybe there is a hidden logic here that I don’t get. It is beginning to sound more and more like Alice through the Looking Glass.
Sir, – Are our TDs really wired to another planet? I read in your newspaper that Frank Feighan, TD, is refusing to being “bullied into making decisions” (Breaking News, July 7th). What an extraordinary statement! Surely Mr Feighan was elected to express the majority views of the people who elected him in the Roscommon constituency.
How clear can the statement be? Where does being bullied into making a decision come into it? If elected by the people, then they are your masters; however, the country is still rotten to the core with those who put personal views and the party promises ahead of everything else. It appears that Mr Feighan put his career before his masters. He should resign immediately.
Politics is no longer an honourable profession and it appears that it is getting worse by the day. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – The move by Denis Naughten TD to vote against the Government shows that parish pump politics is alive and well in this country.
No one wants to see vital services cut, but the reality we live in brought about by the previous governments means some pain has to be felt. When this country comes out of the current recession, don’t rule out services being reinstated or a better service may be provided in the future.
As for Denis Naughten, he has shown that in some corners, little has changed and the Government is better off without someone who is more interested in local votes as opposed to the national emergency we face. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – If the closure of the A&E department at Roscommon County Hospital is not about saving money but patient safety, why is the A&E department to remain open during office hours and to close during the night?
From several visits to Roscommon A&E, I know that it tends to be very quiet before 11am and becomes very busy after 7pm. I doubt that the actual attendance figures over the average day have been taken into account when the decision was taken to close the A&E department at night. The opening hours definitely suit the budget (no night-shift allowance, etc), but completely ignore the needs of patients, which I would have thought would be part of the excellence of care and safety that we are now promised. – Yours, etc,