If retired county council worker Edmund Quinlan lived in the US, his blood would be bottled, a surgeon told the High Court in Limerick yesterday.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar has said that up to 200 additional community beds will be opened and staffed by the middle of the month to deal with hospital overcrowding.

As hospitals brace themselves for industrial action, the country’s largest nursing union has called on the public to join in a major protest outside the Dáil today to highlight emergency department (ED) overcrowding.

Members of the public are being asked to join with nurses for tomorrows lunchtime protest outside the Dáil.

Up to 500 staff at five hospitals in the University of Limerick Hospital Group have begun industrial action over the continued employment of the group’s chief operations manager on €250,000 per year — more than twice the €116,000 that would be paid to a public servant.

HEALTH Minister James Reilly is to be asked to intervene after the HSE announced plans to close 50% of the surgical facility at Croom Orthopaedic Hospital in Co Limerick for eight months.

DOG owners who don’t clean up after their pets soil town and city streets have been branded vandals after an elderly nun slipped on a canine mess, breaking her hip.

APPROXIMATELY three in 10 consultants working in public hospitals are treating more private patients than permitted under the terms of their new contract.

FEARS for the wellbeing of an elderly Limerick widow increased last night at an Italian lake resort where she has been missing since last Friday.

A hospital consultant’s offer to give up about €36,000 of his annual pay to employ a midwife in one of the country’s busiest maternity units demonstrated the desperate state of hospital staffing, it was claimed tonight.

PEOPLE with arthritis are suffering needlessly in the Mid-West due to inadequate specialist care, it was claimed yesterday.

A MAN was being questioned by gardaí last night after a baby girl received a broken leg when a hit and run driver knocked down a young mother and her two children on a Co Limerick road.

ONE man dropped his wife off at the maternity ward and returned to play his round of golf, but even he couldn’t upstage mobile phone magnate Denis O’Brien — who had the mother of all chip shots.