HSE AMBULANCES BROKE down and required roadside assistance more than 200 times last year, new figures have revealed.

A 24-hour breakdown and recovery service had to be dispatched on a total of 203 occasions during 2016 in response to callouts from stranded emergency ambulances.

Almost 5% of the National Ambulance Service (NAS) fleet currently has more than 300,000km on the clock, while one ambulance is still in service after travelling over 400,000km.

Since 2010, vehicles used by An Garda Síochána have been retired at 300,000km for safety reasons. It is not known whether any such guidelines are in place for the NAS.

Concerns about the condition of the national ambulance fleet have been raised in the past in response to incidents in which major mechanical faults were discovered while emergency vehicles were in service.

In August 2015, the two back wheels fell off an ambulance that was transporting a patient on life support from Letterkenny, Co Donegal to University Hospital Galway (UHG) when it was travelling through Co Mayo.

A year earlier, an ambulance broke down in Co Louth while it was transporting a heart-attack patient to hospital. A second ambulance had to be dispatched and a journey that should have taken less than 25 minutes took over an hour.

Around the same time, it was reported that another ambulance in Co Louth was abandoned by its crew when the front of the vehicle filled with smoke. There was no patient on board at the time of the incident.

Of the 203 breakdowns that occurred last year, 45 occurred in the Dublin area and 63 occurred elsewhere in Leinster. A total of 25 ambulance breakdowns were recorded in Connacht, 46 took place in Munster, and 24 occurred in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan.

The county in which the highest number of breakdowns was recorded outside of Dublin was Kildare, where ambulances required roadside assistance on 16 occasions during 2016.

There were no breakdowns in counties Roscommon, Offaly and Longford; while just one breakdown was reported in each of counties Leitrim and Kerry.

When he was Minister for Health in 2015, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced a €9.4-million fleet replacement programme for the NAS, under which 64 vehicles were to be commissioned to replace ambulances that reached the end of their life cycle.

The data, which was released by the NAS under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that there are currently 265 vehicles in the ambulance fleet operated by the HSE.

The HSE did not avail of an opportunity to comment.

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