Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Durkan for raising the issue of services at Naas General Hospital and to also acknowledge the Deputy’s work in advocating for the people of Kildare and west Wicklow.

Naas General Hospital is an acute public hospital with 189 inpatient beds and 18 day-care beds, serving a catchment area with a population of over 250,000 people. The services in the hospital are designed to meet the needs of the adult population, that is people over 16 years of age, within this catchment area. Naas is a model 3 hospital which means that it provides 24-7 services through the emergency department, with an acute medical assessment unit and access to critical care beds.

Naas General Hospital provides the core specialty services of general medicine, general surgery and emergency medicine, catering for patient activity through the emergency department, as well as the inpatient department, outpatient department and day-services department. Additional multidisciplinary specialty services provided by Naas include radiology, respiratory medicine, and urology services.

The Government is committed to ensuring equitable access to healthcare services and to making real and sustainable improvements to realise the vision the Government has for healthcare in Ireland. To that end, there has been significant additional investment in staffing and facilities in Naas hospital in recent years. The 2023 budget allocation for Naas is €84.6 million, up from €82 million last year, and from €63.9 million in 2018.

At the end of February, there were 945 whole-time-equivalent staff employed by Naas General Hospital, an increase of 186 from the end of 2019. This includes an increase of 74 nursing and midwifery whole-time-equivalent positions. There are now a total of 189 inpatient beds in the hospital.

I am happy to be able to confirm to the Deputy that a number of capital projects are currently under way in Naas General Hospital. In quarter 3 of this year, Naas General Hospital expects to open its new 12-bed isolation ward. The reconfiguration and refurbishment of the existing acute medical assessment unit is at appraisal stage and will be initiated through design and planning stages in 2023.

In addition to these projects, the plan to improve mental health facilities in Naas hospital is progressing.

The Lakeview unit is a 29-bed acute psychiatric hospital registered with the Mental Health Commission as an approved centre. An investment in a new build on the Naas hospital site to accommodate 50 single patient rooms with added social and living space will address the immediate needs of the population and will increase capacity and improve clinical care and patient experience. This project is currently progressing through the public procurement code.

The endoscopy-oncology project, as the Deputy has pointed out previously, has faced delays in recent years, but provision of a second endoscopy room is acknowledged as a priority for the hospital and the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group. It is now proposed to engage a design team to update the design to correspond with current technology and standards and to progress through the pre-tender design and planning stages of work in 2023.

The investment of recent years is fundamental to supporting the ongoing development of services and to ensuring that Naas General Hospital will continue to play an invaluable role in the delivery of health services to the local community in the years ahead.

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