Reilly ‘must ensure wards take extra patients’ in times of A&E crisis
The recommendation was made just a day after it emerged that Dr Martin Connor, one of Dr Reilly’s original personnel appointed to the Special Delivery Unit on a €160,000 a year deal to help solve the crisis, failed to attend most meetings on the matter before being replaced last month.
Speaking at the Irish Medical Organisation’s annual general meeting, Dr Peadar Gilligan, emergency department consultant at Beaumont Hospital, said the crisis could be addressed if an existing “full capacity policy” was fully implemented in hospitals.
According to Dr Gilligan, in times of serious overcrowding, the policy allows local managers to order inpatient wards to each take on one or two emergency department patients who have already been cleared for admission.
This then reduces the pressure on the emergency department, frees up space for new patients and so lessens the risk of a backlog and — vitally — allows ambulances, which cannot legally leave a hospital until the person they transported is admitted, to depart.
While the policy is in place, Dr Gilligan said it is only being used on rare occasions, with his own facility, which regularly sees as many as 30 patients on trolleys a day, only implementing the procedure “three times in the last year”.
The lack of use, he claimed, is due to a reluctance to increase the workload on other departments — an issue raised in particular by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation — and a failure by the health minister to enforce it fully.
“What we need to consider nationally is that each ward would have one to two additional patients. So rather than having a situation where there’s 30 additional patients in the emergency department, where there’s a ward of 30 patients, there’ll be one additional patient…
“My feeling is the Department of Health hasn’t been forcible enough in implementing this. It shouldn’t be a local fight.”
