Additional consultants start at A&E

Some the new consultants took up their new posts in January and others only started working in Craigavon in recent weeks.

The addition of these four new staff; Paul Mc Garry, Erskine Holmes, Cathy Daly and Gareth Hampton, doubles the number of Emergency Department consultants working at Craigavon Area Hospital, in the last 12 months.

Mr Seamus O’Reilly, Clinical Director for Emergency Medicine at Craigavon welcomed the new consultants, saying: “I am delighted that we have been able to recruit a number of very high calibre consultants who will contribute greatly to the care and treatment provided here. Craigavon’s Emergency Department is one of the busiest in Northern Ireland with nearly 80,000 people attending here last year. Our priority is to provide the quickest and most effective emergency treatment to those people who need it most.”

Dr Gillian Rankin, Director of Acute Services added: “We are constantly aiming to ensure that the Emergency Department is operating in the most effective way possible and that’s why we have invested not only in additional staff but also in a range of new initiatives such as a new mini-laboratory, due to be completed soon, which will reduce the turnaround time for laboratory investigation by 50%.”

Mr O’Reilly concluded with a reminder that the public can play a significant role in helping to ease the burden on busy emergency departments:

“These new consultants and all staff in Emergency Departments are there to provide highly specialised treatment for people who are seriously ill or injured and need to be treated urgently. Too often, we find our time and resources taken up by people whose ailments are neither serious nor urgent. GPs (or GP Out of Hours), Minor Injuries Units and local pharmacists all provide non-emergency treatment in the community and I would urge people, where appropriate, to use those services instead.”