Hospital Transfers
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

The Deputy is 100% right. It does not necessarily lie with the hospital management. For example, in Cork, with the IHA managers, there is no governance element to this. They are not CUH beds or Mercy Hospital beds, and nobody had better tell me that they think they are. They are beds for the south west, and they have to be managed from a single centre, which happens to be in CUH at the moment, but we will see about that. They have to have visibility over what is the situation in Blarney, Bantry, Mallow, South Infirmary and other places. It is their whole responsibility to be able to move people through.
As for the hospital managers' responsibility, I do not want to hear from consultants who say they cannot move X patient because they need to be in CUH instead of the very good care in Mallow. There needs to be an understanding that every hospital sits within a region, and patient flow works in that way. That is the only way this can possibly work. I am glad to hear the Deputy highlight that because it is the sort of reinforcement I need, particularly in the south west, to make sure that the patient flow experience is fully understood and that every bed is opened.
As regards the Killarney unit, I am told that will be in the next couple of weeks. There was a HIQA registration problem and there is engagement with the union but, frankly, it is not good enough that those beds and other beds have not been opened. Mallow's 24 beds were supposed to be opened in quarter 1. It will now be very shortly but it should have been done.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21