The medical board of Cavan General Hospital has been told the hospital will not receive any extra funding for additional beds this year, it has emerged.
The secretary of the medical board, Dr Alan Finan, said this news, which was "difficult to take", had been relayed to it by executives of the North Eastern Health Board. The medical board had got similar indications indirectly from the Department of Health, he said.
The medical board met health board executives and the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, following the death of a nine-year-old Cavan girl, Frances Sheridan, within weeks of her undergoing an appendix operation at the hospital in January.
At those meetings they stressed the need for a rapid increase in the number of acute medical beds in the hospital. At least 20 were needed.
Dr Finan said that, while a number of other issues were now being addressed, including the appointment of a fourth locum consultant surgeon at the hospital, the issue of beds had not been addressed. There was little point in appointing another surgeon without additional beds, he said.
Cavan hospital has had to cope with an increased workload since Monaghan General Hospital was taken off call. As a result, its A&E unit is regularly overcrowded, and elective surgery has had to be cancelled on an ongoing basis due to a beds shortage. Surgical beds are "overrun with medical patients", he said.
"We have been told by the health board that the Cavan-Monaghan hospital grouping will not be getting any increased resources. We are told there are probably enough resources in the two hospitals combined to look after their catchment areas," he said.
Doctors from both hospitals are now hoping to meet health board management to see if a plan to restructure services can be worked out. No date has been fixed for the meeting, and Dr Finan expects the discussions will take some time.
"We find that difficult. We would have preferred if the acute stress could have been taken out of the situation in the short term through the provision of more beds before we began to look at the long-term reconfiguration issue," he said.
"Now we are still left with the fundamental core issue of not having enough beds to meet the demands on the hospital," he added.
Meanwhile the Minister for Health is to meet the chief executive officer of the NEHB next week to discuss the findings of a review of 15 adverse incidents, mainly surgical, at Cavan hospital between September and December last. A spokeswoman for the Minister said he was concerned at the report's content.
The report, compiled by the NEHB's medical adviser, Dr Finbar Lennon, found that one of the principal causes of the high number of adverse outcomes was the "inadequacies in the assessment and selection process for surgical interventions".
Asked on RTÉ radio yesterday if lives were lost as a result of difficulties in the hospital's surgical unit, the assistant CEO of the health board, Mr Tadhg O'Brien, said: "I've no idea whether lives were lost or not. As I said I'm not a clinician, and there is no indication in Mr Lennon's report whether morbidity has increased or otherwise".
Dr Lennon recommended that patients in need of complex gastro-intestinal surgery should now be transferred to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. But GPs in the area said yesterday this was a 1½-hour journey with no direct bus route.
A Monaghan GP, Dr Illona Duffy, warned that Cavan would have difficulty getting beds for patients in Drogheda.
The Irish Nurses' Organisation questioned how the Drogheda hospital could cope with additional patients without increasing nursing numbers and capacity.