Debate contribution: Independent Reconfiguration Committee
Debate contribution by Mr Robbie Butler on .
- MLA
- Mr Robbie Butler
- Party at the time
- Ulster Unionist Party
- Date
- 7 September 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Question for Urgent Oral Answer
- Heading
- Independent Reconfiguration Committee
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5670241
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I thank the Member for his question. When we are talking about hospitals in our constituencies and the very matters that Members are allowed, through the Principal Deputy Speaker, to raise, we should evidence that with passion, as the Member did. However, in response to the first part of the question, I suggest that, if I went to every hospital across Northern Ireland, they would all suggest that they have been underfunded and that they all need more money and resource. We have a complex and complicated health system. I am not saying that it will ever be any different, because health is complex. We live differently, consume differently and exercise differently. We have an absolute commitment that Causeway will remain a very important hospital. The emergency function has not been removed and will not be removed. I have asked the Department to look at this in the wider sense. I have had to get my head around medical acronyms and what things are called. Emergency general surgery is not the same as an emergency admission. The clinicians talk to me about that, and I ask them questions such as, "What if someone came to the door?". Here is the bit: the hospitals exist for the person who turns up. Not everybody turns up in an ambulance, because, sometimes, an ambulance takes time to come. Lots of people turn up to hospital in a car or walk in, and their expectation is that they will get a certain service. It is a massive challenge. It still might be the right thing to do, wherever the decisions are made. However, if that is the case, the public have to know that there was a reason for doing it and that the rationale is there, and it needs to have their confidence.
300 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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