Health: Some 70 per cent of people who end up waiting hours in A&E wards could be treated by GPs and nurses in new special units in 15 cities and towns, Fine Gael has proposed.
The new urgent-care centres would not replace A&Es but would cut the numbers waiting on trolleys for beds, reduce the number of cancelled operations and allow emergency patients to be treated, said FG Wexford deputy Dr Liam Twomey.
The party health spokesman said blood tests and X-rays would be available in the centres, along with wound-care and urgent support for those suffering from asthma and diabetes.
Four 150-bed community care centres would be built in Dublin to cope with the numbers of older people who needed longer-term care but who did not need to be kept in a fully-equipped hospital.
"Since 1997 the number of community long-stay beds has been continually decreasing and this is having a knock-on effect in our accident and emergency departments," he told delegates.
Some 400 elderly patients were currently occupying hospital beds because of the lack of community places and other services that could leave them living independently at home.
Extra security should be provided immediately to protect A&E staff, while drunks should be put into "wet rooms" to sleep it off and then fined for turning up in that condition.
A 24-hour emergency helpline could offer the public enough information to be able to treat patients at home or to put them in touch with their nearest GP out-of-hours service rather than going to A&Es.
The party's measures were "sensible and could be introduced at a relatively low cost", Dr Twomey said. However he acknowledged that work practices in A&Es would also have to change if current difficulties were to be overcome.
"The Government missed an opportunity in the first round of benchmarking to address these issues," he said, adding that he believed many hospital staff would actually welcome changes in their daily routines.
Former Laois-Offaly TD Charlie Flanagan, who is contesting the next election, said Minister for Health Mary Harney's plans would result in "medical apartheid of a type never seen before".
"The rush to privatisation has taken place with no democratic mandate and no real debate on the commercialisation of our hospital services where patients and citizens become customers and consumers.
"The building of exclusively private hospitals on public sites will only reinforce and copperfasten the two-tier health system of health inequality and division.
"The provision of generous tax incentives to promote the building of private hospitals on State property will do nothing to help the vulnerable who continued to suffer due to lack of adequate healthcare."
The Government's promise to supply 3,000 hospitals beds "is well and truly dead".
"Instead investors will cherrypick the profitable areas of our health service for their own commercial gain and public patients will continue to suffer."
Galway West candidate Cllr Fidelma Healy Eames called for "hygiene flying squads" to be set up to carry out unannounced inspections in hospitals. Over half of the acute hospitals in the country were found to have poor hygiene standards in the review ordered last year by the Minister for Health.
Cork East TD David Stanton said people on State pensions should still be able to qualify for a carer's allowance if they were caring for a relative or friend who would otherwise have to be cared for more expensively by the State.
Carers should be helped to stay part-time at work, and helped to get back into full-time employment after their caring duties ended.
