Children experiencing a mental health crisis will be unable to access an emergency out-of-hours on-call service at the only two emergency departments (EDs) in Cork City after the HSE was forced to suspend the service indefinitely due to chronic staffing shortages.

A teenage girl who threatened to kill her 7-year-old brother, her mother, and her classmates was forced to stay in a crowded emergency department for five days because no psychiatric service was available.