Harris called to emergency meeting to discuss ongoing trolley crisis

Health Minister Simon Harris has been summoned to an emergency meeting of the Oireachtas health committee next week to discuss the ongoing trolley crisis in hospitals.

The meeting, which was agreed to after a suggestion by Sinn Féin health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly, has been called amid record numbers of patients lying on trolleys on wards and in emergency departments across the country.

“It has been clear that the planning of the minister for health and HSE officials has failed, and the consequences are drastic,” Ms O’Reilly said in welcoming the summons for Mr Harris.

“The public health system is currently crippled by a lack of capacity and staff, and hundreds of patients are struggling to access our hospitals daily. The situation is putting the health and wellbeing of patients and staff at risk.”

HSE chief executive Paul Reid said the crisis demonstrates there is “an issue in terms of strategic investment and capacity which is recognised in Government”.

He told RTÉ radio there is an immediate need for 2,500 beds in the system. On the current trolley crisis, he said he “welcomed” the fact the numbers had eased over the past 48 hours, but accepted “there is a lot more to do”.

Yesterday’s figure of 621 people on trolleys, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), was a reduction from the all-time record high of 760 seen the previous day.

Much of that decrease was attributable to sourcing of additional capacity at private and voluntary facilities, the union said.

“If we keep doing what we’re currently doing, we’ll get the same response every year,” said Mr Reid.

We do need to look at the role of all our hospitals across the country for best effect. How do we organise our hospitals so we can manage daily surges and winter surges and elective procedures.

He said the HSE’s 2020 service plan will put in place 1,000 extra staff for community healthcare to ease pressure on the acute system.

INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said that in order to source additional bed capacity, the HSE was making use of funding from the National Treatment Purchase Fund.

Asked what that funding amounted to, Liam Woods, the HSE’s national director for acute operations, said the amount available is “€100m this year… and I think we’re working on an initial tranche of between €5m and €7m and we are not facing any constriction on that”.

Meanwhile, hospital consultants called on Mr Harris to reverse a decision that would see 40% fewer beds delivered to the system by 2021 than was initially committed to.

In 2018, the National Development Plan called for 780 additional hospital beds by the end of next year, a figure reduced to 480 in last year’s Capital Plan.

“Huge swathes of our acute public hospital services are effectively now shut down,” said Dr Donal O’Hanlon, president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association. “More beds and medical specialists are central to solving the capacity problems in our public hospitals.”