*Photograph: Martin Molloy
SAFELY REOPENING the emergency department at Ennis Hospital is a realistic aspiration, Violet-Anne Wynne TD (IND) has maintained while she said the people of West Clare ‘suffer in silence’ when it comes to their fear of health services.
Healthcare and housing in the eyes of the Clare TD are the single biggest areas that the Government is failing the people of the county, Deputy Wynne maintained. “I say housing because of the amount of people struggling with the rental market, access to health care is the other difficult but constant issue we are hearing about and that’s across the board, getting access to a GP, getting to a dentist in the county, getting your child assessed on time within the 17 or 24 months they are talking about”.
Reconfiguration has not improved health-services in the Mid-West, she said. “I think reinstating the emergency department is a no-brainer because we’ve had the Minister speak on this and accept that the reconfiguration was done wrong but yet still won’t tackle the issue and reinstate it. We know our region is the only region now without a model three hospital to complement its model four hospital, it makes logical sense to start putting plans in place and start looking to reinstate them, they are talking about a surgical hub and putting up all these other solutions to it but retrospectively speaking with the crisis we’re experiencing and the trolley numbers on a daily basis with UHL the highest in the country nearly every day, they need to not just acknowledge that the reconfiguration was done wrong but now go about undoing the damage and reinstate the emergency department”.
Calls have been vociferously made by the Mid-West Hospital Campaign to restore the emergency departments in both Ennis and Nenagh. When asked if Nenagh should be reopened along with Ennis, Violet-Anne replied, “I’m for Co Clare, for me my priority is Ennis A&E, I think if we could get them to commit to at least one emergency department being reinstated then we could have conversations about the rest, for me it has to be based in Clare and the reason is for the communities like Kilkee, Carrigaholt who are so far out that their lives are actually at risk because they are such a distance from the emergency department, we know that one hour is the golden hour, unless they are getting the healthcare that they need then they are at risk, for me the only way to resolve that is to be able to only travel to Ennis for example, it shortens their distance”.
Safely equipping an emergency department in Ennis has been flagged by health chiefs as a barrier to such calls while the ongoing difficulty of retaining nurses and doctors does not make matters easier.
Before the emergency department can reopen, Deputy Wynne said the hours of operation for the injury unit must be extended. “The plan is to get them to extend the injury unit, to properly resource the MAU, what we’ve seen is the creation of the new pathway where instead of sending three to five patients to UHL they will go automatically to Ennis but that has affected elective surgery appointments in Ennis. I welcomed at first the pathway with patients being sent to Ennis but I wasn’t aware it would impact on the elective surgeries or anything like that but it has. When we were at the briefing, management gave us assurances that after the pathway was put in that they would meet the consultants in Ennis and discuss what resources would be needed for Ennis Hospital to cater for these new patients coming in but also keep Ennis MAU working effectively, since that no resources have been supplied, I don’t understand what is happening there, that is what I’m trying to chase the Minister on and get those bits of information from him, I know nobody was of the opinion that it was going to be making people go back on the list and waiting longer than necessary for an emergency appointment that they’ve been waiting for”.
A timeline for such proposals is “really down to the Government,” she felt. “The injury unit I would have thought would have been easy to extend but they have been facing difficulties there. There is a need to look at why there is such an issue with retention in the healthcare system, no doubt you’ll have to come and do full circle, morale is low, the investment they’ve had over the last number of years has in effect made the working environment not too great for them either, we’ve also the fact that healthcare staff have been getting abuse dealing with the high pressure environment that they are in, it’s not going to be a one action that will solve it, it’s going to be a ramping up of each of those and will be a bit of a process but unless they make a decision now to do it and start putting those measures in place and making nursing classes bigger in universities for example, they need to be worked out and negotiate. There is a job of work to be done there, all I’m asking for now is the Minister to start doing that, rather than from what I can see acknowledging that the reconfiguration was done wrong but putting it to the one side and saying we’re going to do all of this other stuff. The surgical hub if we’re talking about the reinstatement and suffering the same issues on recruitment and retention well then it is the same for the surgical unit, there needs to be a prioritisation of the healthcare in Ireland, people are angry and are talking about this for years, it is not a new thing, it hasn’t been exasperated by the intensive work that the healthcare stuff done throughout COVID, they need Government to really prioritise their sector”.
When giving birth to her sixth child, Violet-Anne had been in an ambulance and ended up giving birth in the car park of Kilrush Golf Club. This was a positive outcome but Deputy Wynne noted that the people of West Clare are left in fear when it comes to making it to hospital on time in emergency cases.
“The stress people are going through, they are suffering in silence, if they have any kind of condition and they know that they are looking at having to possibly experience that where they are calling an ambulance in the middle of the night or during the day especially if they are living in a rural or isolated area, there is an anxiety and stress that they don’t speak of, it is actually affecting their sleep and them coping in everyday life, being able to eat because they are constantly worried if this or that happens or they don’t get help in time. That is where we’re seeing a lot of the anger coming out onto social media when they are talking about healthcare because so many people now have been impacted or their family member has. It’s not going to be a case of doing what has been done in the past and promising what is going to come, people really want to feel confident that those in leadership are doing whatever they can to bring about solutions for people to have peace of mind in their homes”.
