Northern Ireland’s hospitals in ‘crisis’ with delays leading to deaths, consultant says

Northern Ireland’s hospital emergency departments (EDs) are in “crisis”, a senior consultant has warned, with around 400 people waiting to be admitted on Tuesday.

Dr Paul Kerr, the vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in Northern Ireland, told The Irish Times that people were “lying on trolleys literally queuing to get into hospital” and many were doing so for “two or even three days”.

He said patients were dying because of the delays.

“We have evidence that there are increased deaths associated with the waiting time.”

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The senior doctor said the situation was “unprecedented” and “worse than it was even a few weeks ago . . . which makes you very frightened for the future”.

The chief executives of Northern Ireland’s health trusts issued a joint statement before Christmas warning of a “serious capacity deficit” and predicting pressure on services would “intensify further after Christmas and into the early months of 2023”.

New policies were introduced aimed at maximising resources which included speeding up the discharge of medically fit patients and limiting ambulance handover times to three hours.

The Northern Trust on Tuesday said its EDs at Antrim Area Hospital and Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, Co Derry were under “extreme pressure” and warned people with conditions which were not urgent or life-threatening would face a long wait to be seen. There were similar appeals from other health trusts in Northern Ireland throughout the Christmas period.

Dr Kerr said it was “soul-destroying . . . to see the system in such a poor position, struggling to cope after years and years of pressures where we have just seen things gradually get worse”.

He said that while other jurisdictions were experiencing similar situations, conditions in Northern Ireland were particularly bad because a lack of reform meant it was in a weaker position when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.

“I can’t see anything happening but getting worse in this moment in time,” he said. “We need more staff, we need more doctors and nurses and we need to open beds . . . there’s no point in hoping for system reform when things are evidently getting worse in front of your eyes.

“It’s not like other years. This isn’t some casual winter pressures that’s going to go away in May or June, this is radically different in the size and scope of the problem and I don’t think it will get better for some years, so we really need a more radical plan to cope with this,” Dr Kerr said.

In a statement, the Department of Health in Northern Ireland said that “as in other jurisdictions, hospitals across NI remain under severe strain, resulting in growing numbers of patients experiencing prolonged waits in emergency departments”.

This situation was, the department said, “reflective of the current pressures facing the entire health and social care system, as demand for services outweighs capacity.

“Mitigation measures were put in place ahead of the winter period,” it said, but in the longer term “the Department has been clear on the need for sustained action to build greater capacity – including sustained, significant investment and reconfiguration of services.

“It remains vital that services are used responsibly and that hospital discharge processes are followed when people are deemed well enough to leave.”

The North’s Public Health Agency (PHA) said on Tuesday that flu and other respiratory illnesses were “currently circulating and are likely to continue to increase in coming weeks” while high numbers of cases of scarlet fever also continue to be reported.