Debate contribution: Altnagelvin Hospital: Access to Accident and Emergency

Debate contribution by Ms Sinéad McLaughlin on 21 January 2025.

MLA

Ms Sinéad McLaughlin

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

21 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Altnagelvin Hospital: Access to Accident and Emergency

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4749989

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the proposer of the Adjournment debate. He has clearly articulated the dire state of the A&E facility in the second city. I also thank the Minister for being here and listening to the facts and figures and the testimonials from the citizens of the city and the wider region. It is a regional hospital that is important to many people throughout the West. My biggest thanks go to the chief executive and all the staff in the Western Trust, particularly those staff who are working under really poor conditions in the emergency department. One of the things that has been clearly articulated today is the need for regional balance when it comes to delivering healthcare. People are probably quite sick of me talking about regional balance constantly in an economic context, but it is absolutely vital that we have health equity because poverty drives inequalities in health, and we can see that in the Western Trust. It is often under the most severe pressure. People are struggling to meet the demands placed upon them in our growing population and increasing complexity of needs, as others have said. Altnagelvin is situated, as I said, in one of the most deprived places anywhere in the North, where people bear the brunt of health inequalities. The Western Trust has 24 health outcomes that are worse than the Northern Ireland average. Male life expectancy in the most deprived areas is 73 years — five years lower than the trust average. I have heard the Minister talk about those inequalities in the House as well. In the most deprived areas of Derry City and Strabane, people are dying seven years earlier than the Northern Ireland average. Let me be clear that the physical state of the emergency department is no longer fit for purpose. We cannot wait for the long-term solution for this, which is a complete rebuild. We need to think of short-term interventions. It is too small to cope with the volume of patients coming through its doors. Shockingly, as others have said, it has just one toilet, and it is disgusting. I cannot begin to tell you how disgusting it is. It is not only inadequate, it is utterly unacceptable for the staff and patients who rely on this vital service.

The Health Minister has indicated that it could be five years before a new emergency department is built — five years. That is five years of continued overcrowding, patients waiting for hours without care and staff battling to provide dignity and support in conditions that would challenge the most robust system. I have heard a GP call the situation in Altnagelvin "Third World healthcare". She had to go there to advocate for her patient, who she knew was having a stroke, because they had nobody else to turn to in that situation. That is not good enough. The delay is unacceptable. It fails the people of our city and region. The situation has become so critical that, over the recent holiday period, Altnagelvin was forced to issue an appeal for staff on Facebook. For a hospital to rely on social media to ensure that it could provide basic care to its patients is a stark illustration of how close to breaking point our health service has come. As others have articulated, we are consistently witnessing bottlenecks in the emergency department. That is not just in our emergency department; it is across the region. Those bottlenecks are not just a capacity problem but a symptom of the failure to reform the system to deliver a preventative approach. If we want to break the cycle, we need to start addressing the root causes. We talk a lot here about those root causes. It means investing in community care, expanding GP services and tackling chronic staffing shortages. It also means tackling poverty and its symptoms, including poor health. We have spent decades talking about transforming the health service. Reports have been commissioned, consultations have been hosted and debates have been —

—

We need interventions now.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:48 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

Disagree with this assessment?

Classifications can be challenged. A person reads every challenge, and any change is recorded publicly above with its reason.

Challenge this classification