€70m plan to reduce hospital overcrowding and wait times

Government Ministers will on Thursday unveil a €70 million plan to ease hospital overcrowding and cut waiting times for patients.

Under the plan to be launched by Minister for Health Leo Varadkar and his Minister of State Kathleen Lynch, the bulk of the additional funding approved by the Department of Public Expenditure will go to the Fair Deal nursing home support scheme.

The aim is to reduce waiting times for a nursing home bed from the current 11 weeks to no more than four to six weeks.

More senior clinical decision-makers will be appointed and additional community and step-down beds provided as part of the plan, which has been approved by Cabinet.

It also aims to increase the number of ward rounds carried out in hospitals and provide more home supports to offer alternatives to hospital care.

Ms Lynch is expected to address calls to have the cap on funding for the demand-led Fair Deal scheme removed.

In recent months, up to 850 people have had to wait for access to the scheme because the available funding had been used up.

The Government has insisted the money allocated under the initiative must be used to implement specific targets set out in the new plan drawn up by an emergency department taskforce.

However, it is unclear whether some of the money being allocated has already been spent in the first months of this year on providing temporary short-term contract beds for patients waiting for access to Fair Deal.

Hospital spending rose dramatically in January in an effort to deal with a spike in trolley numbers.

While Mr Varadkar will announce the funding element of the plan on Tuesday, it was unclear on Wednesday night whether the report of the emergency department taskforce he appointed to draw up the detail of the plan would be published.

Sources said a number of last-minute differences between the various groups represented on the taskforce were being resolved on Wednesday night, in particular over the Minister’s plan to allocate the bulk of additional funding to Fair Deal.

Other members were unhappy about the lack of specific targets and additional staffing commitments in their report.

However, Government sources said Mr Varadkar and Ms Lynch will be “very specific in terms of targets” when they announce the plan on Thursday morning.

The taskforce report is expected to recommend a number of measures to ease hospital overcrowding, including more weekend discharges and greater access to clinical decision-making and diagnostics from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week.

Other recommendations will include the discharge of patients before 11am, seeing patients in emergency units within an hour, and a reduction in overnight stays.

Nurses will be given new decision-making powers and some minor surgery will be carried out in GP surgeries.

Some 457 patients were on trolleys on Wednesday, and 501 on Monday, down from a peak of 601 at the start of January but still relatively high for the start of April.

The avoidance of long hospital waiting times next winter is seen as a Government imperative in the run-up to the next general election.

The HSE has estimated over €100 million is needed to solve the current overcrowding crisis.

In the run-up to the last Budget, it sought €106 million to free up hospital beds and tackle overcrowding, but was allocated only €25 million for this purpose.

HSE director general Tony O’Brien warned that unless extra funding was found, the waiting list for Fair Deal would grow to 2,200 people by the end of the year while waiting times would swell to 18-20 weeks.