Union to meet HSE over hospital protest

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation will ask the HSE to employ more nurses and create more step-down beds at one of the country’s busiest hospitals when it meets with the HSE’s assistant national director of acute hospitals, Angela Fitzgerald, tomorrow.

Liam Doran, general secretary of INMO, yesterday joined more than 70 nurses who staged a one-hour, lunchtime protest outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.

The union says there can be more than 50 admitted patients waiting on trolleys in the emergency department until a bed becomes available in the main hospital; the department has 15 cubicles and nurses say there has never been just a single patient in any of the cubicles.