Taoiseach urged to sort out ‘shambolic ambulance service’

COMMON SENSE?Calls have been made to make more use of the new ambulance base at Mulranny.

Taoiseach asked to sort out our ‘shambolic ambulance service’


Cowley campaigns for more crews

Áine Ryan

TAOISEACH Enda Kenny and Minister Michael Ring are ultimately ‘responsible for the shambolic ambulance service we have in Mayo’. That is the view of Mulranny GP, Dr Jerry Cowley, a former Independent TD, who has said that if a major accident happened in Mayo last Friday night there was no ambulance available. For a time during the early hours of January 17 all three ambulance on call were out of the county transporting emergency cases.  
Speaking to The Mayo News last night, Dr Cowley said he was forced to wait for 50 minutes with a patient who suffered a cardiac arrest after he was called out to the emergency at 1.30am. During this protracted wait the Mulranny GP tried to task a helicopter from Athlone but was told it did not fly at night. He then contacted the Coast Guard who said they could not fly because of freezing fog. Eventually a Castlebar-based ambulance, which had been sent to Belmullet earlier because its crew had been taken off active service, arrived and transported the patient to the Cardiac Unit of Galway University College Hospital (UCHG).  
“It is unacceptable that Ireland’s third largest county has been left with no available ambulance during the early hours of Friday last, January 17. This is directly due to HSE cutbacks where a skeleton ambulance service is now cut so much that it is clearly unable to service the health needs of the people of Mayo,” Dr Cowley said.

Crews not to blame
He stressed this was not the fault of ambulance crews ‘who do not have enough ambulances available to them to do the job they were trained to do’. Dr Cowley explained that one of the other two ambulances, which was based in Ballina, had to also travel to UCHG while the third one was sent from Castlebar to Clonbur in County Galway for a seriously injured person, also brought to UCHG.  
“They say that if you have a dog you don’t have to bark, but just 12 days ago I was obliged to go on local media to highlight these same deficiencies in our HSE ambulance service. A new HSE ambulance base lies idle in Mulranny because no additional crew has been provided to run it, meaning people in the Achill-Mulranny-Ballycroy area are outside the 20 mile international benchmark safe distance from an ambulance base putting them at unnecessary risk due to distance,” Dr Cowley continued.

Unnecessary danger
“I now call on Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister Michael Ring to rectify this unacceptable situation where their own constituents were being placed in unnecessary danger. I employ 80 people locally through our St. Brendan’s Village Project here in Mulranny. If any more were required I have the power as Chairman to hire them. Clearly the deficient ambulance service is the result of savage cuts to the HSE who do not have sufficient funds to service the needs of the good people of Mayo. The Government is the executive who can rectify this situation,” he also said.
He cited the fact that before Christmas a man bleeding to death had an ambulance within three minutes, which was based in Mulranny.
Moreover, the urgency of a dedicated Mulranny ambulance crew was highlighted in another recent emergency situation. The Mayo News understands the family of  a woman from the Ballycroy area who was bleeding very heavily from her nose, and subsequently mouth, was urged to transport her to hospital by car. When the family said it was too much of an emergency, an ambulance and crew was deployed and judged the situations so serious that they ordered a helicopter to meet it en route in Newport.

Staff
EARLIER this month the HSE confirmed to The Mayo News that, while the Mulranny Ambulance Station had opened, the service ‘has not been allocated any additional staff for resourcing this station. When possible, crews are deployed from Castlebar to Mulranny. The redeployment of crews to Mulranny depends on the service needs throughout the West region’.
The HSE base at Mulranny is located at Cushlecka on the Achill road out of the village. It is situated on what was an industrial centre for many young entrepreneurs in the area for many years. That centre was run by the Mulranny Industrial Development Trust, which sold the site to the HSE and is now seeking planning permission for a new site adjoining the ambulance base.
The catchment area of the base, when operational, includes Mulranny, Achill, Ballycroy, Bangor Erris, Newport and Kilmeena.