Chris Luke: The urgent care system requires an urgent fix

Chris Luke - as part of our 'My Message to the next Dail' series -  calls on all Dáil candidates to visit their local emergency department to ensure they get the scale and perniciousness of the problem and its consequences

The state of our hospital emergency departments is literally a matter of life and death for many of the 1.4m patients who attend them annually.

The old quip that ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’ is a colourful but useful way perhaps to describe the mindset of the gutsy men and women hoping to be elected to our parliament in about two weeks.

That is why I take the opportunity today to appeal to them in relation to the state of our hospital emergency departments (EDs), which is literally a matter of life and death for many of the 1.4m patients who attend them annually.