Patients with severe brain injuries can be waiting up to two years to be admitted to the National Rehabilitation Hospital, it was confirmed yesterday.
Dr Mark Delargy, a consultant in rehabilitation medicine at the facility in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, said patients should ideally be admitted within two weeks of referral to the hospital but this was not achievable with current resources.
He said some patients - those with the most severe injuries - could be waiting up to two years to get into the hospital. Others with less severe injuries could be waiting months.
He told a conference on acquired brain injury in Dublin there was a need for more beds for these patients as well as more specialists to treat them. There are 47 beds for patients with acquired brain injury in Dún Laoghaire but there should be 360, he said: "So we have about one-seventh of what is required in terms of inpatient capacity."
There was also a need for greater integration with community services, he added.
Mick Clavin of BRÍ, the acquired brain injury advocacy association, told the conference that up to 20,000 people acquired brain injuries in the Republic every year as a result of falls, assaults, road crashes, strokes and brain haemorrhages.
He claimed brain injury was misunderstood by a lot of people. Sometimes victims had no physical symptoms but could be left suffering from memory problems and depression. He said sufferers were often misdiagnosed and, as a result, they understood the anxiety, hurt and worry of women in the midlands whose breast cancer had been misdiagnosed. "We can empathise with them . . . Hundreds of people with brain injury are misdiagnosed every year."
Delegates reiterated calls for a special strategy to be drawn up on the treatment of those with acquired brain injury.
Minister of State for Health Dr Jimmy Devins said the development of such a strategy was under consideration.
He said he hoped more money would be provided in the Budget for people with disabilities.