Huge number of non-emergencies in Mercy A&E

Having navigated the trolley-lined corridors of the Mercy University Hospital to his office, Chris Luke, Emergency Department consultant, said it is difficult to estimate waiting times.

“It depends on how lucky they are,” said Dr Luke.

“If they came in and it’s a proper emergency they’ll be seen within half an hour to an hour today.

“But if they need a bed and are quite sick they may wait a day or two. If they want a bed, it’s all very different.

“So we’re not as bad as we were yesterday, yesterday it was terrible and at the weekend people were waiting six to 10 hours.

“It comes and goes, but when it is bad it is desperate, and the biggest problem that we have at the moment is that conditions become a vicious circle.

“The doctors and nurses don’t want to work in these conditions.”

Long-term solutions will not alleviate the immediate problems, but Dr Luke said that escalation policies as operated in the US can be taken to ease the blocked-up corridors sooner.

“When they’re really overcrowded, they decant patients from the overcrowded corridors and put one patient on a trolley in each ward,” said Dr Luke.

“So you have an ordinary ward and in the corridor of that ward you have one patient on a trolley, as opposed to having 50 patients on my corridor in CUH or, as is the case today, maybe 15 patients on my corridor in the Mercy.

“I’m saying to anyone who would care to visit or reflect, don’t tell me that one patient on a ward corridor is more dangerous than 15, 20, 30 patients on a corridor in an emergency department.

“In terms of dignity, disease, privacy, and patient preference, it’s self-evident. That’s what you can do immediately.”

Another problem is what Dr Luke describes as the “going to the butchers and asking for a loaf of bread syndrome” — patients who bring their ailments to the accident and emergency department when they could be dealt with elsewhere.

“We end up dealing with a huge number of cases that are not theoretically, legally, semantically, or nominally emergencies,” he said.

“As long as that is tolerated we’re going to be overcrowded.

“The worst examples are what is called granny dumping, where people heading to the airport on holidays to Spain dump their grandmother or grandfather in the waiting room of the emergency department.

“Does it happen? Of course it happens, in Ireland much less than the UK.

“That’s the worst example.”