Ireland cannot rely on Spanish hospitals to solve waiting list crisis, bishop says

The Irish healthcare system cannot rely on other countries to solve the waiting list crisis and public patients should not be expected to travel to receive scheduled care, said the Bishop of Limerick on Monday.

Bishop Brendan Leahy was speaking as he announced a €210 million plan to expand St John’s Hospital in Limerick, including a 150-bed on-site extension.

It emerged last week that a new hospital opened in Alicante, Spain, will be used for treating public patients on long waiting lists in Ireland as part of an EU cross border directive.

Bishop Leahy, who is chairman of the voluntary hospital’s board, said: “The future generations are calling us here today to do what we can to ensure that they won’t have to travel to Galway or Cork, or indeed Spain, to receive scheduled surgery and the excellent care possible in a newly energised St John’s.”

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Management at St John’s Hospital in Limerick unveiled a five-year expansion strategy on Monday “to ensure best-in-class care delivered at hospital is matched by state-of-the-art facilities”.

The plan, developed by the UL Hospitals Group (of which St John’s is a member) in consultation with staff and local GPs, is seen as playing a “key role in addressing capacity requirements in the mid-west”, the hospital said in a statement.

The proposal would accommodate “a very significant proportion of the scheduled care work in the region, and it provides solutions to the critical needs associated with the public waiting lists”, the statement said.

The proposed development will increase St John’s bed capacity from 89 to 200 and aims to deliver an additional 31,390 bed days per annum in the Limerick region. If approved, the development would take an estimated 36 months to complete.

A total of 667 additional full-time equivalent jobs, via direct and indirect employment, are proposed, including 52 new frontline clinician and support roles at St Johns, which presently employs 350 staff.

St John’s chief executive Emer Martin said despite providing “outstanding results” to patients for more than two centuries, it has “been long since acknowledged that the facilities here are simply not fit for the purpose or the people”.

Full time A&E departments at St Johns, Ennis Hospital and Nenagh Hospital were downgraded to University Hospital Limerick in 2009, however, the increased pressure on the hospital has exacerbated patient overcrowding in the region.

Last month the UL Hospitals Group said it accepted the findings of a damning report by the Health Information and Quality Authority, which found “insufficient” nursing staff numbers at the hospital was “having an impact on the safe provision of care”, and its “overcrowded and understaffed emergency department posed a significant risk” to patients.