Hospitals accused of 'bed-blocking'

The Irish Hospital Consultants' Association has alleged that hospital managements around the country have deliberately adopted a policy of keeping elderly patients in acute beds on a long-term basis as a means of saving money.

The secretary general of the IHCA, Mr Finbarr Fitzpatrick, said yesterday that it was more economical for a hospital to keep an elderly patient in a surgical bed for 30 weeks than to have 30 surgical patients spending a week each in the same bed.

He said the surgical patients would generally require "a battery of radiology and laboratory tests" while the elderly patient was generally receiving only bed and board.

Mr Fitzpatrick maintained that the surgical patients who could not be treated as a result of beds being blocked, remained on waiting-lists at no cost to the hospital.

Mr Fitzpatrick said the phenomenon of "bed-blockers" was the modern equivalent of hospitals closing wards over the summer months to control costs.

He said it would not be politically acceptable at present for hospitals to close wards so they have resorted to blocking beds with elderly patients as a means of saving money.

The Irish Times reported earlier this week that the main Dublin hospitals had collectively overrun their budgets by around €20 million in the first seven months of the year. Mr Fitzpatrick said the hospitals would not have been in a position to keep beds blocked with long-stay patients without the covert agreement of the Department of Health.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Ms Harney, has come under strong pressure to tackle the problems facing accident and emergency departments, where patients requiring admission have been queuing on trolleys for days due to a shortage of acute beds generally and the blockage of existing beds by patients who have concluded their acute treatment but who have nowhere else to go. Ms Harney said earlier this week that the current situation "was not good enough" and that it was not going to continue.

Speaking in response to the IHCA statement, the chairman of the Dublin Area Teaching Hospitals' group (DATHs), Mr Michael Lyons, said they were operating at 100 per cent capacity.

He said the DATHs group had consistently highlighted both publicly and to the Eastern Regional Health Authority and the Department of Health that the provision of long-term care in the acute hospitals was one of the factors impinging on capacity.

"The impact of having to provide long-term care is affecting not only the emergency departments but also elective treatments," Mr Lyons said.

The pressure on A&E services has eased somewhat with a reduction in the number of patients waiting on trolleys, according to latest figures supplied by the Irish Nurses' Organisation.

It reported that 136 patients were waiting yesterday on trolleys in A&E in hospitals around the State compared with 216 at the same time on Wednesday. In Dublin, there were 98 patients on trolleys and outside of the capital 38 patients were waiting for treatment or admission.

At the Mater Hospital there were 24 patients on trolleys.