Nurses: 75,000 patients waited on trolleys last year

MORE than 75,000 patients spent time on hospital trolleys last year while awaiting an inpatient bed, according to figures released yesterday by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.

The figure, the highest in five years, represents a 35% increase on 2006 figures and is a damning indictment of a series of expensive government and Health Service Executive (HSE) attempts to resolve the perennial crisis in the country’s 30-plus emergency departments.

According to the INMO, the number of patients on trolleys has climbed irrevocably in the past three years. A temporary improvement in 2007, a year after then Health Minister Mary Harney declared the crisis in EDs “a national emergency”, vanished by 2008.