Ambulance Waiting Times

It depends completely on workload. I was passing by and attended a poor guy in the city centre at 1am who was pretty bad. I offered assistance to the Gardai who were there. They gladly accepted. We waited about 45 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. The DFB engine arrived before it. It was during the crazy scenes during lock down and it was Dublin 2. That was after several calls from the Gardai.

The crews that arrived were brilliant, just overloaded. Of course, it depends on the workload. Another time, I attended a drunk lying on the ground another night. It was an hour and a half on a Saturday night and then we cancelled it. He came around and we were able to call a family member to collect him.

very true, on that day in question there were 10 ambulances parked up outside Vincent's hosp. both NAS and DFB. plus there is the added complication of nearly 3 different hand overs to do, #1 to the lay person receptionist #2 to the covid filter nurse, #3 to the actual nurse you hand over to, who is no doubt doubling up on some other duty to cover a colleague having a flash lunch/toilet break utterly ridiculous, all in an open area, in ear shot of others....public,security, etc.., GDPR and patient confidentiality out the window..

On your next hospital stay you can mention that to the nurse thats not had a break for 6 hours.

thats well said, I,ve spoken to NAS crews at hospitals around dublin and they are all singing the same song, no breaks, travelling miles and not getting a to a call, if they are dragged into the midlands they will be forgotten by their control and kept there...and the NAS are trying to take over dfb.s workload too, shambles.

seems the norm in most countries

The inadequacies are in the high salaries of consultants and mangers in the HSE. The inadequacies are in the overly heavy management structure of the HSE. The Department of Health is one of the best funded departments in the country at 22.2bn, second only to the Department of Social Protection at 23.5bn, the next biggest budget item is Debt servicing and EU payments at 13.92bn.

The DoH is awash with money compared to literally any other government department except DSP, there should be no reason they cannot provide a decent service with the funds available, even taking inward immigration into account. The issues are not with the numbers seeking the service but with how the service is run. There have been news stories for decades about the bloated health services in this country and the associated mismanagement, and that is absolutely no reflection of the hardworking men and women on the frontline every single day.

Closing our borders is the last thing to be done to fix this particular problem. We would be more in line to tell the unions to bugger off, tell a lot of the ineffective management and civil service side of the DoH to go with them and completely restructure the entire service. No more lip service and no pandering to ridiculous ideas that it's immigrants putting strain on our health service.

Well lets take Limerick as it is one of the most overcrowded hospitals in the country and also happens to be my hometown. Well, a while back (2009) the government thought it would be a great idea to close the ED in Nenagh and Ennis, to be replaced with "community health centres", these didn't materialise to the level promised and we're now left with a single ED for Limerick, North Tipp, North Cork, North Kerry, and Clare. That is the reason for the overcrowding in Limerick. They also closed the ED in St John's Hospital in Limerick City, now a minor injury clinic.

We've got a fantastic large new ED built in UHL, but the catchment area is just way too big because of government policy over a decade ago, not population growth. The hospitals are still there and underutilised. If they reopened both Nenagh, Ennis and St John's then you would find a lot of the overcrowding problems solved overnight.

Its not.

Its age. People think of ES going to road traffic collisions, builders chopping their hands off etc. The biggest part of what they do is elder care. There was a show about the NAS (https://tilefilms.ie/productions/paramedics/) but it was short lived. You can also see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09393rd .

There are frequent fliers that ambulances visit several times a week. Its an ineffective way of half caring for the elderly. We need to start building massive state run nursing homes. (Wont go further here in case its seen as politics).

sorry to hear that, but did you not contact your gp first at a local level and get them to do a house call and access their patient and see weather the emergency dept. is the best place for her, maybe she could have been treated at home in the comfort of her own bed.

sometimes people can be waiting more than 4 hours in the emergency dept just to see a doctor even if the ambulance response was prompt.

They tried that in the UK, it does not work,

Thousands have died through reconfiguration , hundreds of lives have been saved.