Daily overcrowding record at UHL with 95 people awaiting admission

University Hospital Limerick (UHL) has set a daily record for overcrowding, with 95 patients waiting for admission on Tuesday morning.

The hospital, which regularly ranks worst for trolley numbers, had 69 patients waiting for admission in the emergency department (ED) and 26 elsewhere on wards in the hospital.

UHL alone accounted for almost one in four of the 409 patients waiting for admission nationally on Tuesday.

Letterkenny University Hospital had 56 patients waiting, while University Hospital Galway had 34, according to the TrolleyWatch count from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.

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Four children were among those waiting for admission, at Crumlin and Temple Street hospitals.

Hospitals with no people waiting on trolleys included Beaumont, Cavan, Connolly, Nenagh, Kilkenny and Bantry.

A separate count by the Health Service Executive records 269 patients in adult EDs this morning. This is almost 60 per cent higher than the same day last year.

Waiting 24 hours

This figure includes 122 patients who have been waiting more than nine hours for admission and 53 who have been waiting for more than 24 hours.

The HSE’s €77 million winter plan, published on Monday, said an enhanced focus would be maintained on a group of hospital sites “in a prolonged state of escalation”, whose challenges were not amenable to a “quick fix”.

Hospitals in Cork, Galway and Limerick are listed as having the highest numbers of patients waiting for admission.

“In such cases, sites are often using extraordinary measures to address the increased demand profile. It is unlikely that these sites will improve in the short term as they require a suite of targeted de-escalation measures to re-balance and a review of and attention to the causative factors which gave rise to the continued escalation,” the HSE said.

“This may include some suppression of incoming demand, adding various types of capacity (acute, community, diagnostic) and tightly governing changes to operational systems and processes with strong focused leadership and governance.”