Sir, – What caught my eye in your article “Hospitals on red alert over trolley patients” (Front page, December 19th)was not so much the figures detailing unrelenting Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding in many Irish hospitals, but the response attributed to a HSE spokeswoman that the issue you sought to highlight was “no particular cause for concern”.
ED overcrowding has been shown time and again (most recently in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, December 2012) to result in adverse patient outcomes, including preventable deaths. Where else in the health service would an activity unequivocally known to harm patients be allowed to persist? Unlike victims of cancer misdiagnosis or other high-profile clinical adverse events, those harmed by ED overcrowding are generally nameless and faceless – they tend not to make the papers. Perhaps that is why their fate remains “no particular cause for concern”.
Five-and-a-half years ago, the HSE’s own ED task force recommended a “zero tolerance” approach to ED trolley waits. That meant zero, not 340, and not 20 per cent fewer than last year. Seven months ago, the Hiqa report on Tallaght directed a similar approach.
Will next year finally see the Irish health service acknowledge that zero means zero, so that 13 may be lucky for some? – Yours, etc,