URGENT ACTION is needed to alleviate overcrowding in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, an organisation representing hundreds of hospital staff has said.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation said 800 of its members working in the hospital have, in recent meetings, voiced their concern at overcrowding at the hospital.
The organisation’s industrial relations officer Edward Mathews said cutbacks had caused the closure of 60 acute beds in the last year. He said 81 patients who were medically fit to be discharged could not be moved on as no nursing home beds were available. This had to be addressed urgently.
“We now have an overcrowded emergency department and an overcrowded hospital,” he said, adding patients on trolleys were being put in behind doors or between existing beds on in-patient wards.
“Patients are coming in one door of the emergency department, but patients are not going out the other door of the hospital . . . and that is manifesting itself in extreme overcrowding.”
He said the situation was particularly worrying given it had arisen during the summer months, when the hospital did not have an upsurge in admissions due to seasonal illnesses.
A spokesman for Beaumont said the emergency department had been under severe pressure this week. He said that while at 8am yesterday there were 38 patients awaiting admission, the hospital had implemented its full emergency protocol and had reduced that number to 17 by afternoon.
“In accordance with the hospital’s escalation policy to help the emergency department cope in such circumstances, 10 additional beds were provided on wards throughout the hospital . . . and 12 additional beds have been provided in the day ward.”
He said the opening of additional long-stay capacity at the community nursing unit at St Joseph’s Hospital in Raheny would help alleviate the situation.
Separately, a Health Information Quality Authority (Hiqa) directive that Tallaght Hospital stop placing patients due to be admitted onto trolleys in corridors near the emergency department is to come into effect tomorrow.
The Irish Association for Emergency Medicine welcomed the directive and called on all hospitals to desist immediately from placing patients on trolleys in and around the emergency department, citing associated increases in mortality and morbidity. “The effect of this Hiqa safety directive must be to outlaw this and similar practices countrywide,” it said.