Waiting list figures at Letterkenny University Hospital have more than doubled in the last year, according to a new overcrowding report
The INMO annual Trolley and Ward Watch for 2017 revealed that 4,889 patients were on trolleys or on additional beds in wards as they waited on admission to LUH. This figure has more than doubled from 2016 figures, which recorded 2,047 patients on trolleys over the year.
As the New Year dawns, the INMO has called for ‘immediate and dramatic action’ to avoid more record-breaking overcrowding levels throughout Ireland.
In Ireland overall, throughout 2017, 98,981 admitted patients were recorded as awaiting a hospital bed. In the final weekend of the year there were over 300 patients waiting on trolleys or on additional beds in wards in national hospitals.
The INMO said that any improvement to hospital overcrowding is highly unlikely in 2018 unless, drastic and innovative steps taken immediately.
Reacting to the level of overcrowding, Phil Ni Sheaghdha, the newly appointed General Secretary of the INMO, called on the HSE to explain how the predictable increases in Emergency Department (ED) admissions remain outside of the scope of hospitals to manage and control:
“Overcrowding in late December and early January is getting worse. Despite investment in winter plans, smaller hospitals are now severely overcrowded which is manifestly unsafe and leads to higher cross infection and poorer outcomes for patients.
“Nursing staff, constantly working in this high pressure, unsafe environment, cannot be expected to put up with this obvious neglect of duty of care to them and the patients they try to care for any longer. It appears to me, that staff and patients, on the front line, were abandoned while the system shutdown for Christmas and the New Year,” Ni Sheaghdha said.
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