Having a national ambulance service base in Urlingford would be of massive benefit to the area.
So the Castlecomer Municipal District meeting has heard.
Representatives of the NAS and HSE presented their plans to set up a Standby Point at the town’s old fire station.
It could see an improvement in service response times – depending on traffic and weather it currently takes 30-to-45-minutes for paramedics to travel from KK City to the area.
The proposal will next go before the county council early next year after the north Kilkenny councillors outlined their support with Chair Mary Hilda Cavanagh saying such a move will “make people’s lives safer”.
She told KCLR News; “The HSE had applied to us to use the old fire station as an ambulance base and we will be recommending that ambulances will be based in Urlingford which will be fantastic because it will shorten the time for the ambulance to get to an accident or an emergency so it’ll make people’s lives safer”.
Paramedics rostered to the base wouldn’t just cover North Kilkenny as Cllr Cavanagh outlines; “It will also cover points in Tipperary and Laois and I’d say a catchment area, a circle of about 20miles, it’s adjacent to the motorway which means that should there be an accident, a bad accident in particular, that ambulances will be on location very, very quickly”.
Now that the Castlecomer Municipal District has given its approval, the plans will next be presented to the County Council – if it gets the official go-ahead there, it could begin service soon according to Cllr Cavanagh;
“It will be well administered and it will be set up fairly soon because the station is in good order, it just wasn’t adequate for the fire service, it did a great job while it was based there but now there’s a bigger and better and more modern station being built and both fire tenders will be based at the new station where they weren’t at the moment because they wouldn’t fit”.
