Long ambulance delays in county Mayo are ‘putting lives at risk’
Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh has described what she called a growing crisis in ambulance services across the county.
The Sinn Féin representative called for urgent intervention from Taoiseach Micháel Martin and the Minister for Health, urging them to lead a coordinated response to what she called a “dire and unstable” situation, and to improve the overall supply of ambulance services for communities in Mayo.
Deputy Conway-Walsh outlined how people in Mayo, particularly in the north of the county, who find themselves in need of an ambulance are unable to get an estimated time of arrival when they call for one in an emergency.
She said some patients have been “left waiting hours”, while others are left with no option but to travel up to 50 miles on poor country roads to reach the nearest hospital if an ambulance does not arrive.
When patients are able to get transport to their nearest hospital, she continued, they are frequently brought to “overcrowded Emergency Departments that do not have adequate staffing or the bed capacity to accept them”.
Mayo University Hospital (MUH) has issued multiple statements to the public in recent months warning that its Emergency Department (ED) is operating at full capacity and that arrivals should expect long waiting times.
The latest warning came on Monday, January 19, when MUH reported that the ED was at capacity, with 18 patients waiting on trolleys that morning.
Additionally, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation entered a dispute with hospital management last year over safe staffing levels in the ED. The INMO had planned strike action but later suspended it following negotiations with the Workplace Relations Commission.
Deputy Conway-Walsh warned that Mayo cannot continue to operate in a situation where ambulances are taken off the road to be used as “overflow capacity for hospitals”.
This issue has previously been reported at MUH, where severe overcrowding last summer resulted in a man waiting for more than 13 hours in an ambulance outside the hospital before being admitted for treatment.
Deputy Conway-Walsh asked the Taoiseach in the Dáil last week whether he knew the number of people who were dying prematurely because they could not get an ambulance on time, and asked him what he plans to do about it.
In response, Mr Martin said there is a “national framework in terms of the organisation administration of ambulances” and said there are “various criteria [and] various metrics in terms of outcomes and so on.”
He added that he would refer the question to the National Ambulance Service.
The Mayo TD argued that wider failures across the health and social care system need to be addressed if the crisis is to be resolved, stressing that additional ambulance funding alone would not be enough.
“Providing additional funding for more ambulances only for them to be left queueing at overcrowded Emergency Departments is not the answer either. This is not an ambulance-only problem, it is a system-wide failure that requires a coordinated government response to tackle the bottlenecks preventing patients from moving through the health system,” she said.
Deputy Conway-Walsh commended the work of hospital staff and ambulance crews in Mayo and in the west of Ireland, but highlighted that they are working “under huge stress in a broken system”.
She called for investment in step‑down beds, homecare packages, and community supports to ensure that medically fit patients can be discharged safely and quickly.
“This would immediately free up hospital beds, reduce Emergency Department overcrowding, and allow ambulances to get back on the road,” she said.
Deputy Conway-Walsh warned that the crisis demanded cross-departmental action from the Government, “before more families are left devastated by the avoidable loss of their loved ones”, and said that “lives in the west depend on it”.
This article has been funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.