A protest has taken place at University Hospital Waterford highlighting overcrowding at the Acute Psychiatry Unit.

Senior HSE management are to meet to discuss security and other arrangements after five people were reported missing from a psychiatric unit at one of the country’s busiest hospitals in the past two months.

The HSE has been criticised for admitting 21 children to an adult acute psychiatric unit where more than half the staff did not have up-to-date training in Children First, the national guidance for safeguarding children.

Psychiatrists at Cork University Hospital have rowed in behind nurses in a row with management over health and safety issues at a new €15m acute psychiatric unit that should have opened last January.