Beaumont emergency department goes ‘off-call’

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation demanded that one of the country’s busiest emergency departments go ‘off-call’ last night as 40 patients were forced to wait on trolleys.

Just before 7.30pm, the union issued a statement claiming the number of people awaiting an in-patient bed in the emergency department in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital was extremely high for that time of the evening and “is set to increase further as the night progresses”.

“Of the 41 admitted patients, 18 are over the age of 75,” it said. “They have been forced to spend days on trolleys and chairs in frantic, bright and noisy conditions waiting for a bed to become available. The department is also short two nurses and it is impossible to provide a safe level of care to patients in these conditions.”