Surgical hub guidelines highlighted by Donegal councillor ahead of vital meeting

Councillor Declan Meehan has highlighted the guidelines surrounding patient distances from surgical hubs.

This comes ahead of a meeting to take place today of Donegal doctors with the Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, on the decision to establish a North West surgical hub in Sligo instead of Letterkenny.

Milford-based Cllr Meehan shared: “The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, who wrote the guidelines on Surgical Hubs, advise that no one should be more than 120km away from one. Therefore, it makes no sense to place the northwestern Surgical Hub in Sligo, as demonstrated by this graphic. This is how stark health inequality is in Donegal.

“The doctors are meeting the Minister for Health on Tuesday, and we politicians are meeting the HSE tomorrow about the placement of the Surgical Hub in the north west. Let’s hope they listen. We can’t afford to be overlooked yet again.”

A graphic on the surgical hub issue shared by Cllr Declan Meehan

A meeting was organised with Minister Carroll MacNeill after a group of 171 Donegal doctors voiced their concerns after it was revealed that a new surgical hub was expected to be based at Sligo University Hospital rather than Letterkenny University Hospital, a move that clinicians in Donegal said was “flawed, unjustified, and deeply damaging.”

The doctors, who were based at Letterkenny University Hospital or were local GPs, felt the decision was a critical threat to patient care and health equality in the North West, and called for an urgent meeting with the Minister for Health.

Dr. Padraig McGuinness, a Fanad-based GP, said: "The decision to overlook LUH ignores both population need and geographic logic. Donegal has a larger population than the combined areas of Sligo, Leitrim, South Donegal, and Cavan. Many of our patients would face round-trip of five hours or more to access elective surgical care in Sligo. That’s unacceptable and dangerous."

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Consultants at Letterkenny University Hospital contest that they can point to long-standing underfunding and neglect of the hospital.

They argue that: LUH receives half the per-patient funding compared to SUH; LUH has the longest waiting times among all model 3 hospitals; and in the 2025 HSE Capital Programme, LUH was allocated just 0.3% of the national capital budget - a figure they call "scandalous" given the hospital’s patient load.