Debate contribution: Ambulance Waiting Times

Debate contribution by Mr Colin McGrath on 13 January 2025.

MLA

Mr Colin McGrath

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

13 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Ambulance Waiting Times

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4738579

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the proposers of the motion for bringing it to the House. It is really important that, if nothing else, we acknowledge the fear in our community about ambulance provision. People are genuinely afraid, forbye all of our discussions here as to why, that, when they need an ambulance, when they lift the phone and dial 999, there is not immediately somebody at the other end who can come and help them. Of course, the paradox in that is that, as politicians, we will always try to find the blame and see who we can point the finger at in order to say, "Why is that not happening?". We certainly cannot point the finger at our ambulance personnel. We have to recognise the absolute frustration that they feel. I am sure that all of us will know paramedics. We know people who are working in the trade. Imagine being a highly trained, highly skilled, life-saving individual who goes to work to use those skills but is sent to an ambulance that has been sitting outside a hospital for a number of hours and asked to take over looking after an individual and spend their whole shift sitting in the back of that ambulance until the next person comes on duty and they pass the individual on to them. We might think that that is something that is exceptional and takes place only on the odd occasion: regrettably, it happens every day. When we look at what happened in our health service over the Christmas holidays, we saw that in a really acute way. We saw one occasion when the vast majority of our ambulances were stuck outside emergency departments. As has been mentioned, the issue is patient flow. If we had 500 people who were medically fit to go home but could not be allowed to leave hospital because no care packages were in place for them, the 400-odd people in the emergency departments could not move up to the wards. If those 400-odd people were in the emergency departments, there was no room at the inn for those in the back of ambulances, and that is where they had to stay. We can identify the problem, but it is not a new problem. Mr Chambers mentioned that the seeds of the problem were sown some time ago. I would go back further than Alan was maybe thinking. The agenda for the last 20 years in the health service here has been about centralisation. I was listening to some of those consultants over the holiday period saying that they had never seen so many people in our emergency departments. My thoughts were that I have never seen the North have so few emergency departments. If we do not have the places to put people — there are only a handful of those places left — they will be crammed. I look at my constituency and my home town. There was a home — St John's House — that had 50 or 60 beds for elderly people or those who were maybe exiting hospital and could spend a few days or a week or two there before they went home. The whole agenda was to close those places. Other homes in my constituency are open only because there was a massive community movement to fight the agenda of closing such places. We need to wake up to the realisation that, if we close places and do not spread the burden, we will have the pinch points.

Yes, I totally agree. Also, if you are in a rural community, there is that little added concern that, if your ambulance comes to collect you to take you to, for example, Belfast or Derry, once the ambulance rolls out of the hospital, it could well be diverted to another call in that city, which means that, when people in a rural community ring for an ambulance, it sometimes has to be sent from 20 or 30 miles away. That means that the rural dweller is often the one who loses out in that movement. I know that we have problems with staffing. I know that we cannot open every unit and have every emergency department filled with professionals. We do not have them. I raise the point, however, because I know that we want to look for solutions. I know that the Minister will agree with me and that he has tried this in the past, so I will continue with other Ministers from the past, present and future to say: let us build our workforce so that we have people. About six weeks ago, I sat with my mother in the Ulster Hospital for six and a half hours to get a blood test. Surely, my 81-year-old mother, who will slaughter me for calling her age out, could have had a blood test done somewhere much closer to home without having to travel 25 miles. There are lots of problems in the system. It is not the ambulance staff; it is the system. Let us get the systemic problems fixed.

848 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:43 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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