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.

They also says a single nurse can have to look after up to 15 patients.

The union wants the HSE to agree to a ‘timeline action plan’, which would see more nurses employed over the next three months and more beds created in the community.

“There is in the region of 68 patients who have been clinically discharged from both Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and from the Louth County Hospital in Dundalk and those beds, if freed up, could be utilised for emergency department patients,” said Mr Tony Fitzpatrick, industrial relations officer of the INMO in the North East region.

Mr Doran said that the INMO has been counting the number of patients on trolleys every day for 10 years and “the numbers daily are worse than 2007 when the then minister called the over-crowding a national emergency”.

“They closed much of the beds in Dundalk and Navan and expected here to take up the slack and the people who suffered most are the patients and staff.”

Siptu also took part in the protest and it’s assistant organiser John McCamley said it is concerned that “the situation poses a threat to patient safety”.

In a statement, the HSE said it is working with the nurses to address pressures in the emergency department.

Among the measures is the recruitment of 16 permanent nurses, creating 18 beds in a Clinical Decision Unit for patients who need ongoing monitoring as opposed to hospital admission and “training of overseas nurses to enable additional private nursing home beds to open”.

Members of the public beeped their horns in support of the nurses; the Drogheda Council of Trade Unions also attended to show their support.