A&E nurses need colleagues’ help to deal with overcrowding

Emergency department nurses are not getting the help they need from their colleagues on the wards to deal with overcrowding, an emergency consultant has claimed.

Feargal Hickey from the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine said doctors in EDs shared the same frustration as the nurses they worked with.

He said he was glad the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) had taken on the cause of ED nurses — accounting for about 5% of the group’s membership — who feel their colleagues on the wards could be more helpful.

“The reality is that their colleagues on the ward could be more pro-active in taking patients up quicker to a bed and contribute to the discharge of patients at an earlier stage,” said Mr Hickey. “They have been less than enthusiastic about full capacity protocol which is an important safety valve for patient care.”

Mr Hickey said there was really no incentive in the current system for patients to go home in a timely fashion and, whenever a problem arose and there was no bed for a patient, the default position was that they stayed in the ED.

“If patients went to wards in greater numbers, you would find the wards would be more effective in making space for the next patient on the basis that otherwise they would have an extra patient, or an extra two patients.

“It is a very simple concept but when you have a problem that is manifested in one area and the solutions are somewhere else, it is very difficult to solve it.”

The HSE director of human resources, Rosarii Mannion, said she did not accept a claim made by the INMO that hospitals would have to cancel or defer planned surgery earlier and more often because of the new deal for nurses.

The INMO general secretary, Liam Doran said waiting lists would grow longer because of the new plan to deal with overcrowding in EDs. He believed the lists would grow longer to avoid the placing of extra beds on trolleys at them when there was pressure on ED.

Ms Mannion, speaking on RTÉ radio, believed that the agreement, if accepted by INMO members, would mean there would be designated staff who would manage patients waiting to be moved to wards. Those staff members would be looking at patient flow and timelines and ensuring there was better communications generally. The executive council of the INMO decided to defer strike action over ED overcrowding to allow members consider proposals.