Madam, - With regard to the RTÉ Prime Time programme last Monday on hospital emergency departments, the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine (IAEM) cannot condone the use of hidden cameras to record footage of vulnerable, often elderly patients waiting for admission to a hospital bed.
We believe this practice infringes a patient's right to privacy and compounds the already grossly unsatisfactory arrangements that apply as they await an appropriate hospital bed. However, the programme has served to highlight graphically just how unsatisfactory conditions for both patients and staff actually are.
The IAEM regrets that it has taken a programme such as this to bring the matter squarely to the notice of the general public.
The programme supported the IAEM view that:
• The situation is intolerable and must be rapidly and comprehensively resolved.
• The HSE and the Department of Health and Children must immediately adopt a culture of zero tolerance for trolley waits in emergency departments.
• CEOs/general managers must be held accountable for patients who are left waiting in emergency departments for hospital beds.
• The continuing overcrowding poses a significant health risk to patients as emergency departments are not intended or resourced to look after inpatients.
• While emergency departments continue to accommodate inpatients there will be significant delays in the assessment and treatment of all patients attending A&E.
• The continuing housing of inpatients on trolleys is an affront to their basic human rights and human dignity.
• The root causes of the problems lie primarily outside emergency departments and are due to a lack of hospital beds for those patients who require admission to hospital.
Despite the Tánaiste's claim that there were only 13 patients waiting more than 24 hours in emergency departments on Monday evening, by 8am on Tuesday morning there were 209 patients waiting overnight in emergency departments for an inpatient bed. - Yours, etc,
FERGAL HICKEY, President, JAMES BINCHY, Secretary, Irish Association for Emergency Medicine, St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2.
Madam, - Watching Monday night's Prime Time I was shocked by the grossly inhumane experiences to which vulnerable people are subjected to in many of our A&E departments.
As a clinician and lecturer in nursing of many years' experience both here and in Britain, I have never witnessed such appalling chaos, neglect and obvious human suffering among helpless, dependent and anxiety-ridden patients.
I would regard such gross suffering not only as professionally indefensible but morally questionable and totally at variance with fundamental Christian tenets. The programme-makers should be congratulated on exposing the true horror rampant in our A&E departments.
I know from direct clinical experience that doctors and nurses do their utmost to provide a service which is as professional and humane as possible despite the deplorable lack of essential resources blatantly denied to them by a Health Minister who is either unwilling or incapable of addressing the problem.
This Minister is paid a handsome salary to ensure adequate resources coupled with an effective and efficient delivery of medical and nursing care to all citizens as required.
Acknowledging the existence of a crisis at this late stage is not good enough. She should have anticipated this inevitable eventuality, which has been blatantly obvious even to the most casual observer for the past couple of years. This kind of crisis does not develop overnight.
What next, Minister? Throw more money at the problem or, much preferably, manage it? - Yours, etc,
PATRICK J O'BRIEN, Freelance Lecturer in Nursing, Maynooth, Co Kildare.