Leo Varadkar warns hospital bed crisis may worsen

A possible surge in flu cases and the impending changeover of junior hospital posts may put further pressure on already overcrowded hospital emergency departments, Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has warned.

Health officials have warned that the number of patients on trolleys today and tomorrow may match or even exceed the spike recorded last week, when at one point 601 people were waiting for admission to hospital.

Mr Varadkar said yesterday that while significant progress had been made, “we’re not out of the woods yet”.

While not downplaying the seriousness of the crisis,he disputed claims that last week’s figures represented a record high in the number of patients on trolleys.

Last Tuesday's 601 was the highest recorded by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation since they started the Trolley Watch survey 10 years ago. The previous record was 569 in 2011.

However, the Minister said the INMO had changed the way it counted to include people waiting on wards as well as in the emergency department. Either way, the figure was still “far too high”.

He said 525 people were on trolleys in wards last week, but this was now down to 209. Some 104 of these were waiting for more than the target time of nine hours, 50 fewer than last year.

While many hospitals had cleared their waiting lists, there were problems in some areas – University Hospital Galway was having trouble finding qualified staff while Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda had no step-down nursing home places available locally.

Flu-like illnesses

Mr Varadkar said there was evidence influenza might be on the way: “if that happens we’ll be in great difficulty”. The reporting rate for flu-like illnesses doubled in the first week of the year compared to the end of 2014, according to the HSE’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre.

He also noted that the twice-yearly rotation of junior doctor posts took place next week “and that’s always a difficult time”.

He said he had recently become aware that a small number of consultants were refusing to accept referrals from outside their “catchment areas”. This was unacceptable, he said, as there were no catchment areas in the health system. New patients must be accepted even where there were long waiting lists.