South Armagh Ambulance Cover ‘a huge issue’ | Latest Newry News, Newry Sport and Newry Business for Newry City

South Armagh Ambulance Cover ‘a huge issue’

Sinn Féin MLA Megan Fearon has said she is ‘deeply disappointed’ at a Ministerial reply to a question she asked about ambulance cover in South Armagh.

fearon21The South Armagh representative said the Health Minister’s response would provide little comfort to the people of the area.

“Ambulance cover in South Armagh has been a huge issue for years now,” she said. “On the 19th of February I asked the Minister to outline what steps were being taken to improve ambulance cover in South Armagh.

“A week after that we got a terrible illustration of just how bad the problem is when a guitarist took a heart attack during a gig in a South Armagh GAA club. Thankfully, he is fine and the paramedics who treated him were exceptional, however, the band playing was able to call a replacement guitarist who, at short notice, was able to come from Banbridge and was on stage playing before the ambulance even arrived.

“This is an incredibly serious issue; literally life and death, which is why, firstly, I’m hugely disappointed that it took the Minister five weeks to reply to my question.

“His answer, when it did come, hurried out in the last days of the Assembly, contained nothing of substance for the people of the area,” she insisted.

“He even went so far as to cite the First Responder Scheme in his reply, an organisation set up by the community because of the lack of adequate ambulance cover in the area.

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CountryFest gifs“I find it astonishing that the Minister is now relying on a community group that was set up to try and offset the potentially tragic consequences of his failure to provide proper ambulance cover for South Armagh.

“This is not a criticism of the paramedics, who do an outstanding job with the resources they are given, this is an issue of the distribution of those resources and it seems quite clear to me that the Minister has decided the people of South Armagh can just do without.

Fearon added, “It’s unacceptable and neither myself, nor the people of south Armagh, are going to stand for it.”

Short URL: https://newrytimes.com/?p=55562

Posted by on Mar 31 2016. Filed under Community, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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