A&E report must make proposals, says consultant

INSPECTIONS of hospital A&E units will be pointless if the Health and Safety Authority doesn’t make any significant recommendations to improve conditions, a consultant said yesterday.

The Health and Safety Authority (HSA) will examine 11 A&E units nationwide from next week. However, Beaumont Hospital A&E consultant, Dr Aidan Gleeson, said: “The main concern of A&E consultants is that these inspectors will say, as they said in the past, that they can appreciate our difficulties, but under current legislation they are not in a position to make any recommendations.”

He admitted there were occasions when A&E departments were unsafe and times when nurses were pushed beyond their limits because they simply had too many patients to look after.