Air ambulances seen as key to success of Hanly proposals

AIR ambulances will be the key to the success of the Hanly Report on medical manpower, a leading accident and emergency specialist said yesterday.

The latest report on health services reform recommends that 60 acute and local hospitals lose their emergency services with patients being transferred to 12 major hospitals with specialist services.

However, patients have criticised the proposals, claiming they would not be alive today if they had to travel the extra distance to one of these major hospitals.

But one of the country's leading accident and emergency (A&E) consultants insisted yesterday that lives would not be put at risk if the Hanly recommendations were implemented as long as proper pre-hospital and primary care services are put in place.

Director of emergency medicine at Cork University Hospital Dr Stephen Cusack said: "There is no need for people to panic how do people manage in Australia and Canada where they are thousands of miles away form the nearest hospital?"

A proper system of pre-hospital care would have to be put into place to ensure that real emergency cases could be dealt with properly, he said.

This will include:

providing air ambulances, or helicopter services to rural areas;

providing GPs with the equipment like defibrillators for heart patients;

upgrading and improving ambulance services.

Dr Cusack said 70% of cases that present at A&E units were routine and did not need immediate intervention.

The chairman of the task force which produced the report, David Hanly, said yesterday that a new system providing better GP and paramedic back-up would be set up before the new system was introduced.

Asked if this would include air ambulances, a Department of Health spokesman said: "The minister said this would be looked at but the entire ambulance service will be upgraded before the Hanly Report is implemented nationwide."