Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has ruled out the reopening of closed emergency departments in Mid-West regional hospitals to combat the chronic trolley crisis at University Hospital Limerick.
Mr Varadkar said in the Dáil it was the expert advice that centralised services were better “even though I know that must sound absurd to people who are experiencing overcrowding”.
He told Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea that expert emergency department consultants had advised that reopening closed emergency departments “isn’t the right way to go” when resources were already spread very thinly.
The Limerick TD appealed for the Government to consider reopening at least one of three closed emergency departments in the region including Ennis and Nenagh hospitals.
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The Taoiseach said centralised services in a number of locations were the way forward despite it must “sound absurd” when there was overcrowding. The best approach was to provide additional capacity at University Hospital Limerick and more community services for Ennis, Nenagh and St John’s hospitals.
But Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who earlier raised the ongoing “appalling overcrowding” at University Hospital Limerick, said “we’re short 1,000 beds in hospitals across the State”, and the Government “refuses to fund the 1,500 rapid-build beds that were promised on three separate occasions last year”.
She said her party colleague Maurice Quinlivan had to intervene in the case of a 71-year-old stroke patient who spent eight days on a trolley in the hospital. “We can only imagine the distress of that patient and their poor family as they looked on feeling helpless.” She said permanent crisis at the hospital “is now the norm”.
Pointing to the 143 patients on trolleys, she added that people were being urged on Tuesday to avoid emergency departments, while scheduled surgeries were deferred as “staff struggle to deal with the high levels of overcrowding”.
The Sinn Féin leader said last month 2,247 people were treated on trolleys, “the highest number on record for any hospital ever”.
But Mr Varadkar hit out at Ms McDonald, and claimed she was giving “misinformation”. He said that increasingly media outlets and some international politicians accepted most of what Ms McDonald said “without evidence or without proof because increasingly you say things that are misinformation and they get broadcast on the news and it’s never said that it’s misinformation”.
He said the Dublin Central TD claimed waiting lists were at a record high. “They’re not, Deputy. Waiting lists have fallen now for two full years in a row, and this will be the third year in which our waiting lists in Ireland fall. We have more beds. We have more than 1,000 extra beds since this Government was formed.”
Ms McDonald said Limerick was the only emergency department servicing a population of 400,000 people in the region. The crisis was a direct result of decisions by successive governments to close emergency departments at Nenagh and Ennis, the refusal to properly fund GP and community health services. “There are significant staffing gaps in the hospital. And worse still, you’ve put in place a recruitment freeze which only adds to the crisis.”
Mr Varadkar insisted “we’ve seen a big increase in recruitment. We’ve never had more people working in our public health service than is the case now. We have 8,000 more staff hired last year alone,” and the HSE would hire another 2,000 to 3,000 staff this year.
The problems in Limerick “are very real” and it was about capacity. “It’s about clinical leadership. It’s about management and it’s about taking a comprehensive approach.”
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