Orla Considine

There will always... Like, definitely people do not fully understand how the services work and there will always be ambulances that look like they're available if there's an ambulance base in a hospital grounds.

Sometimes they are there and there for the night duty crews that are coming in, that there's nobody there to crew them.

And sometimes there will be ambulances and they may be held up at a hospital and there may be somebody at the front while their colleague is dealing with a patient waiting to hand over in the hospital.

So if there's an emergency call and there's an ambulance free, it's never that an ambulance wouldn't be sent to an emergency call if they're free and available.

They may have had trolleys in them, but they may have patients on wheelchairs in the hospital.

I can't answer for that, but there is never an ambulance not sent if there are two colleagues free and available to answer a call.

And the same today, people will not refuse to go to a call.

The fact that people like yourself, unfortunately, do end up waiting and on a daily basis will end up driving family members to hospitals is that we don't have enough resources.

And we will never have enough resources when the service is not fully funded and when we cannot entice people to come into the job.

But when they're in the job, we can't entice them to stay in the job when they have a degree underneath them and they cannot progress their career and they cannot be paid for it like they would.

They just transfer into other services in the medical field.