The Health Service Executive (HSE) has said that with the exception of three hospitals, there has been a significant improvement in the number of patients having to wait for more than 24 hours in A&E departments for admission to wards.
The exceptions were Mayo General Hospital, Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda and Beaumont in Dublin.
Despite the improvement, according to new official figures nearly one-quarter of the 23,000 patients admitted through A&Es each month have to wait for 12 - 24 hours.
The HSE also said yesterday that Beaumont and the Mater hospitals in Dublin had not made great strides in dealing with the problem of delayed discharge of patients - where the patient remains inappropriately in an acute bed due to the lack of step-down or other suitable accommodation. It said that nationally, there were 482 delayed discharge patients in hospitals last week, down from 559 in August.
The HSE said that the percentage of patients waiting over 24 hours in A&E for admission declined from about 9 per cent to just under 4 per cent from last May to December.
It said that the patients who had to wait more than 24 hours "were concentrated in a small number of hospitals, notably Drogheda, Mayo and Beaumont".
In early December, there had been some improvements at Drogheda and Mayo, it said.
Dr Ciarán Browne of the HSE performance monitoring unit said there had been a significant reduction in the number of patients on trolleys in hospitals such as St James's in Dublin last year compared to 2005.
He said that in Beaumont, the results had been mixed, but that Mayo General Hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda had not seen great reductions.
Nationwide fewer than 10 people per day were waiting longer than 24 hours on trolleys, although the figures were beginning to creep up again a small bit, Dr Browne said.
The director of the HSE's national winter plan, John O'Brien, said that whereas in 2005 there were about 15 hospitals which regularly had patients waiting in A&E for longer than 24 hours, the figure was now down to three or four.
However, the HSE accepted that its figures did not tell the full story in relation to waiting times in A&E. It said that it only began measuring the length of time a patient had to wait from the point they were deemed by a consultant to require admission, rather than from the time they first presented in the department.
It said that it would shortly begin publishing figures "for the total patient experience time".
The Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) said that the survey had been conducted nationally, but that A&E problems were not experienced everywhere. Rather, they were concentrated in a number of hospitals. The INO said it accepted that the A&E situation had improved, but claimed that problems remained in more than three hospitals.
Meanwhile, Mr O'Brien said that there were particular problems in relation to delayed discharge of patients in north Dublin. However, he said that over 200 contracted beds in private nursing homes would come on stream in Dublin this year.
Separately, a new HSE survey has found that 76 per cent of patients were satisfied with their experience in an emergency department. It found that 50 per cent of patients were examined by a doctor within an hour, and a further 25 per cent within three hours.
However, it also found that one-quarter of patients said that they either got insufficient information or no information about their condition and treatment in A&E.
The survey also indicated that one in six patients did not understand the concept of the triage system, where people were treated in order of medical priority rather than on the basis of who arrived first.
