AS MANY as 9,000 hospital bed days are taken up unnecessarily with care that could be administered at home, according to the Health Service Executive (HSE).
In an update on its attempts to cut waiting lists yesterday, the HSE said an estimated 700 patients currently receive certain types of IV drips which could be administered outside of a hospital as part of their care.
It is hoped that by this time next year these patients will be able to avail of a programme called OPAT (outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy), freeing up the beds for other patients to use.
Speaking at the HSE update on outpatient clinical programmes to improve patient care, Dr Colm Bergin said people were in hospitals who did not need or want to be there.
He outlined how through the foundation of regional centres around the State, patients who otherwise would need to check into a hospital could avail of the antimicrobial service either at home or in a healthcare facility.
Previous local studies indicated that up to 34 per cent of inpatients were receiving IV antibiotics and a large number of these could be treated and managed at home, thereby avoiding admission for many of them.
Although Ireland already has several OPAT programmes operating in various hospitals, there are no formal national structures. There is also a lack of conformity of care across programmes.
Apart from freeing up hospital beds, Dr Bergin said this was a patient- friendly method of administering healthcare, with surveys indicating a preference by patients to receive care in this way.
“If you give people a choice, they usually want part of their care to be in a non-hospital environment if they can. It means they are around their families and often back at work,” he said.
“We have planned for 2012 that we will partner with primary care services and maybe avoid the hospital all together for some of these patients,” he added.
According to the HSE, a further advantage of the programme is that patients would be less likely to contract a hospital-acquired infection when treated at home.
It was also announced yesterday that despite the HSE recruitment embargo, a new class of epilepsy expert nurse will be hired to improve treatment of the disease at a local level.
The aim of this programme is to help reduce the number of patients presenting to A&E, where 8-10 per cent of admissions are estimated to be epilepsy related.