Cavan hospital left out of goodies

The Cavan-Monaghan Hospital Group could miss out completely despite recent and much-lauded HSE and Department of Health announcements on extra beds and new ambulances.

According to a response obtained by The Anglo-Celt, there are no plans to provide extra bed spaces locally before the end of 2015, nor any commitment on new vehicles for the area under the fleet replacement programme.
Last week Tony O’Brien, Director General of the HSE, said the bulk of the 440 extra beds promised by the Department would be open by Christmas, as health workers struggle to deal with overcrowding in many of the country’s Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments.
So far this month, up to Monday evening last, November 9, there have been 12 patients consigned to trolley spaces at Cavan General Hospital.
Meanwhile, there has been no commitment one way or another that any of the 64 new ambulances as part of a €9.4m investment under the fleet replacement programme will be delivered locally.
There have in the past been widespread concerns over the standard of emergency response vehicles being used by paramedics and staff locally, particularly after a patient and crew escaped injury the ambulance they were travelling in from Cavan General Hospital to Beaumont caught fire last year.
The incident on the M3 at Navan prompted the National Ambulance Service to commission an independent technical examination of the ambulance to determine the cause of the fire.
The HSE confirmed that, in the past, four vehicles out of a total nationwide fleet of 266 were damaged by fire between 2007 and early 2009.