I thank you, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to raise this very important matter on behalf of people who are undergoing great strain and hardship by being obliged to travel to cork Regional Hospital for dialysis treatment. They have to travel three times per week on a continuous and perhaps permanent basis. Some people from the Dingle area leave home at 5.30 a.m. and having arrived at the hospital they spend approximately five hour? on the machine before returning home. That practice is repeated three times each week.
The Kerry branch of the Irish Kedney Association have lodged £90,000 in the banks, to purchase the necessary equipment. That was a very generous response on the part of all concerned. The only expense to the Department of Health would be in relation to staff. The community have responded in such a I generous way because they are conscious of the extreme stress, strain and hardship suffered by these patients and their families, who have to continually undertake such travel over a long and hazardous route. It now rests with the Department of Health to bring the ordeal of those people to an end by sanctioning the installation of a modem dialysis unit in Tralee and to have the money collected by the people put to the use for which it was intended -- to provide a service to a community suffenng great hardship -- rather than allowing it to lie idle in the banks.
At the moment some 13 people travel from the area in question to Cork for treatment each week. I urgently seek the co-operation of the Minister in giving her approval for the installation of the necessary unit. It is a long time since the Tralee General Hospital was established, some six or seven years. The provision of dialysis treatment facilities at the hospital was anticipated by the community.
There is no condition so requiring of instant specialised treatment as the condition of those who need treatment under renal dialysis technology. The treatment has to be carried out within a hospital and it has to be ongoing for a good number of hours. Difficult as the journey to Cork may be in summer time for the patients in question it is almost impossible in winter when frost and snow descend on those mountain roads, with all the additional mental stress and strain that involves for both patients and their families lest it should not be possible to reach the treatment centre. The community have provided possibly more than would be required for the purchase of a unit for the Tralee hospital, The Irish Kidney Association in the first instance requested only £60,000 but people of Kerry responded with a 50 per cent increase on that amount in order to put the cost factor beyond any doubt. I appeal to the Minister here tonight to say that the people concerned have suffered enough, that an end should be in sight and that they should be able without further delay to receive the treatment within the confines of their own county. That would still involve fairly substantial travelling for some patients, but it would certainly ease the burden, the pain and the stress suffered by patients and their families as a result of being obliged to travel a possible 200 miles to Cork.
