Local Fine Gael Councillor John Dolan has once again criticised the ambulance response time to an emergency call in Moate last week.
“I received a call from a very concerned, frustrated and angry mother who had to wait for close to an hour for an ambulance to arrive at her home. She had made an emergency call to the ambulance service as her young son was vomiting up blood in their home in Moate.
“Understandably, this was a very frightening experience and an ambulance had to come from Birr and bring her child to Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe for treatment. Luckily and thankfully the child is now recovering and was discharged the following day but if this was a more serious complaint, the outcome might not have been so good.
“I have been raising the lack of an effective and appropriate ambulance service for the last number of years, and a response time of 60 minutes is simply not good enough and will have to change.
“There seems to be no plan in place to provide an ambulance service in which we can have confidence to at least give a seriously sick person a fighting chance of survival by being at an emergency scene in reasonable time.
“In my view, this is solely down to a complete lack of resources by the management and leaves the paramedics on the ground scrambling around the country trying to do the best that they can.
“I have raised this at both local and national level in the past and will be raising this latest incident also. Lives will be lost while persons are waiting for the help which the brilliant paramedics conduct when they arrive at the scene of a medical emergency.
“I feel so sorry for these paramedics and I for one will be pushing hard for the ambulance service to be properly resourced with staff and equipment in the future,” Cllr Dolan asserted.
