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"It's death by geography" - West Ireland's ambulance service

A Roscommon man whose seriously ill father waited three-and-a-half hours for an ambulan...
Newstalk
Newstalk

21.47 18 Aug 2015


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"It's death by...

"It's death by geography" - West Ireland's ambulance service

Newstalk
Newstalk

21.47 18 Aug 2015


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A Roscommon man whose seriously ill father waited three-and-a-half hours for an ambulance, despite living next door to the ambulance depot, has said Ireland’s rural ambulance service issues amount to: “death by geography”.

When the local GP in Boyle, Co Roscommon, attended James Woods’s father in the family home June 8, she diagnosed the elderly man with a pulmonary embolism. She contacted the emergency services and made the operator on the phone aware that James’s father had to be in a hospital within the hour. Three hours and 28 minutes later and James and his father were still waiting.

“She sat down and she called ambulance control and she said she wanted dad in A&E within the hour,” James said.

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“And still three hours and 28 minutes later we still had no ambulance.”

“It’s death by geography. You live in Dublin you’ll survive, you live outside of Dublin you die – simple,” he told The Pat Kenny Show.

INTERACTIVE: Where are overcrowding and waiting lists the worst in Ireland?

James Woods says the root cause of the wait was a wrong categorisation by the ambulance service operator, who mistakenly labelled James’s father’s as an Alpha case – placing it lower in priority than more serious Delta cases. This mistake therefore meant it would not receive the immediate attention required.

Read more in the "Your Hospital, Your Health" series:

James insists he has no issue with the ambulance service staff, but: “The fault I have is with the controllers, how they send out the actual vehicle and I have a big, big fault with the current government with the way they’re downgrading us here in Roscommon,” James added.

“A lot of these controllers are not medically qualified. That’s a big, big issue,” James said.

“It’s catastrophic to think that there’s people here answering phones and directing emergency vehicles out when they have no background in medicine or they have no background in anything like that.

“I think they may have a very, very limited knowledge, some of them, and over the years they may have taken up on a lot of it but the majority are call takers.

“You can have (the ambulance call-centre) in China, you can have it in America or anywhere (and it wouldn't make a difference),” he added.

Ambulance services in the west of Ireland have been hit by cutbacks and there have been many reported cases of slow response times, or entire areas left without service.

On Saturday of last week Ennis in Co Clare had half its required ambulance service, while the west of Clare had no emergency service for several hours.

The HSE said: "A €5.4m budget increase in 2015 is helping to address service gaps, particularly in the west, by reforming rostering and staffing additional stations."

Specifically focusing on Roscommon, the HSE says: "There have been significant improvements" in ambualcne services for the county since 2011.

"Currently, three ambulances during the day and two at night provide emergency cover in Roscommon town.  In addition, a rapid response vehicle, crewed by an advanced paramedic, provides 24/7 cover."

Speaking to The Pat Kenny Show for the “Your Hospital, Your Health” series, James says he would have considered taking a legal case against the HSE had his father survived – not for monetary gain, but for accountability, he says.

“The HSE are a law unto themselves, they don’t answer to anybody.

“They won’t comment on individual cases.

“They’ve been at this for donkey’s years and getting away with it, now they have to be accountable. They have to be accountable to us as citizens of this country and tax-payers.

“That’s all I’d ask, is that someone is made accountable for the likes of our scenario.”

You can listen to the full report including James's interview below:

"It's death by geography" - West Ireland's ambulance service

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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