West Clare has been left without ambulance cover during summer months with dispatches made to Cork instead, a county councillor has claimed.
At a recent meeting of the HSE Regional Health Forum West, Cllr Cillian Murphy (FF) sought an amendment to the operational procedures for dispatchers in the National Ambulance Service “to ensure an estimated time of arrival by the ambulance to the required location”.
National Control Operations Manager in the National Emergency Operations Centre of the National Ambulance Service, Sean Brady in a written reply detailed that a Medical Priority Dispatch System is currently used.
This he said, “has a systemic evidence and research based methodology which assist our emergency call takers to determinate the level of acuity which ranges from minor injury or illness to serious life threatening calls”. Brady stated that it would be “very difficult and can be misleading to predict a respond time at time of call certainly for the lower acuity calls”.
Cllr Murphy said it was “disgraceful in my view and disrespectful to the committee” that no member of the NAS was virtually present at the meeting. “I know people working in the ambulance service who have serious frustrations with ambulances being used as a taxi service to hospital, that is their words not mine”.
He felt the provision of approximate times would encourage more people to make their own way to hospital. “If someone is waiting 23 hours for an ambulance then to me it doesn’t fit the criteria of an emergency”.
Over the summer period, the ambulance in Kilrush has been tasked to Cork “leaving West Clare without cover in the summer when we’re dealing with a population explosion going from 1,000 people in Kilkee to between 15,000 and 20,000”.
“I think the whole process is flawed in my own view, it’s not my first time or my last time saying it, the deployment system might tick all the boxes but on the ground in human terms it doesn’t stack up,” the Kilkee representative concluded.
