Ambulance shortage 'costing lives'
The failure to provide new ambulances for the Greater Dublin area is depriving patients of the Golden Hour needed for their survival, it was claimed tonight.
There are just 11 fire brigade ambulances which deal with the vast majority of emergency calls from the region’s 1.2 million population.
The SIPTU Dublin Fire Brigade convenor Tony McDonnell said ambulance crew were struggling to attend calls promptly in the so-called Golden Hour, with waiting times of up to 20 minutes in many cases.
“The Golden Hour is that if everything is done right in the first hour, with the appropriate attendance into hospital and being fast-tracked for treatment, the patient’s chances of survival are greatly enhanced,” he said.
“If the resources don’t expand to meet the demand, then the taxpayers are not getting the services they should be getting.”
Patients who suffer cardiac arrest have a greatly increased chance of survival if they are treated by an ambulance crew with defibrillators within 10 minutes but a greatly reduced chance if it takes longer.
Mr McDonell said the number of ambulances had remained the same since 1986, despite a quadrupling in emergency calls from 20,000 then to around 80,000 now.
“We have just not expanded in 20 years. You look at any other service, the Gardaí, the prison service, you name it, things have improved. But the Celtic Tiger never hit the Dublin Fire Brigade.”
The Health Service Executive (HSE) Eastern Area also has a fleet of 55 ambulances for emergency services which operate from the same control room as the Dublin Fire Brigade.
However, the two services are not integrated and Mr McDonnell said only a limited number of these ambulances were operational at certain periods of the day.
He called on the HSE to treble the number of fire brigade ambulances to 33 to deal with the increase in emergency calls.
“There are 22 people, two per ambulance, responsible for 90% of 999 calls in the Dublin city and county. It’s absolutely incredible. There are times when we are being delayed for two to three hours at hospitals.”
A management consultant, Conal Devine, has found that patients are being put at risk by the lack of a single system for dispatching all emergency ambulances in Dublin.
But Dublin Fire Brigade members refused to co-operate with the study because they had not been consulted about the terms of reference and it has not yet been published by the HSE.
The HSE said its fleet of ambulances responded regularly to emergencies in conjunction with the ambulances operated by Dublin Fire Brigade.
“We’ve put a lot of additional resources into ‘smarter services’ such as emergency response teams and four or five motorbike ambulances, which are very effective and have great access in terms of speed,” said a spokesman.
He said the response time for ambulances in the Greater Dublin area were among the best times in the country but added that the funding for all services was under review on an ongoing basis.
