Number of patients on trolleys drops sharply after record highs

The number of patients on trolleys has dropped sharply this morning after hitting record levels over the previous two days.

There are 371 patients waiting for admission to hospitals, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, compared to 601 on trolleys on Tuesday and 584 yesterday.

Overcrowding is worst at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where 42 patients are on trolleys and in wards, followed by Connolly Hospital (38) and University Hospital Galway (37). Bantry Hospital and South Tipperary General Hospital have completely cleared their backlog of patients.

Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has said hospitals should place two extra beds on every ward as a temporary measure to help ease overcrowding.

However, the INMO says this will have no effect on overcrowding in emergency departments and is already happening in some hospitals. General secretary Liam Doran said it would only push the problem "up the house".

Mr Varadkar has said he is “sick to death” of the problem of overcrowding in hospital emergency departments and he plans to tackle it once and for all.

Speaking after he returned from the US - a day after the numbers of patients on trolleys in hospitals across the State breached the 600 mark - he acknowledged measures put in place over Christmas to deal with the problem had not succeeded in preventing the crisis.

Mr Varadkar said he predicted the crisis before Christmas and had convened a meeting of a high-level emergency task force within the health services on December 23rd.

“These are the worst figures for four years but that’s not the point. If there are 500 or 600 patients [awaiting admission] that’s too many. Nobody should be on a trolley for nine hours.

“There is a patient safety risk for somebody on a trolley for that long,” he said.

Mr Varadkar said the situation was likely to “get really bad” next week as the second week of January was normally the most critical of the year for admissions.

Defending the actions that had been taken to address the problem, Mr Varadkar said that a series of measures had been put in place but accepted that they had not been sufficient to deal with the problem, resulting in over 600 patients - a record - awaiting admission to hospital on Tuesday.