Despite confusion, Roscommon A&E will close on Monday

After confusion yesterday (Thursday), it emerged today that the closure of Roscommon Hospital's A&E unit will go ahead as planned on Monday. There was a suggestion that the closure was being deferred for one month. However, the A&E unit will close on Monday and be replaced in the daytime hours from 8pm to 8am by an "urgent care centre". What had prompted talk of a deferral was the fact that, for one month, the night time service will now be provided by non-consultant hospital doctors rather than by GPs. It had been planned to have a GP out of hours service at the hospital from 8pm to 8am, but negotiations had not been concluded, and some say even started, with GPs in Roscommon. So yesterday, the fact that an urgent care centre service (rather than A&E) run by junior doctors would carry on for one month between 8pm and 8am - to allow the GP negotiations continue - was being presented as some sort of breakthrough. The reality is that on Tuesday in the Dáil, the Minister said precisely that. "I can give an undertaking that between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. there will be a new GP out-of-hours co-op service in Roscommon town, based in the hospital outpatients department. "I hope that will only be a temporary situation and that we can ultimately move, within a month or so, to that being carried out in the urgent care centre with access to diagnostics. "In the interim, and the HSE is trying to find the right person to do this because it involves a particular skillset, I am seeking one, but I think we will need two, non-consultant hospital doctors to staff the urgent care unit between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. under the supervision of local consultants. "This is only a temporary measure. It will be run on a bona fide, pro bono basis by local consultants and would not be sustainable in the long term. The Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, will not accept it for longer than a month, nor will the HSE's clinical leads. However, it would buy time to allow the GPs to consider moving to the urgent care centre." So nothing has changed. There was no climbdown on Thursday - no deferral, no shift from the original hardline position.