Almost 40% of patients waited nine hours for a bed this month

Almost four out 10 patients waited more than nine hours to get a hospital bed this month, it emerged at yesterday’s meeting of the Joint Committee on Health and Children.

HSE director general Tony O’Brien presented figures on hospital admissions through emergency departments for the first half of this month.

Mr O’Brien said 61.9% of people were admitted to a hospital bed within nine hours of registration and admitted that this clearly meant that 38.1% were not.

“We are not claiming that everyone is admitted in the period they should. We are simply quantifying the scale of the problem,” he said.

Mr O’Brien was updating the committee on the work of the Emergency Department Taskforce, which he co-chairs with the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation Liam Doran.

He said that, of the non- admitted patients who attended emergency departments earlier this month, 90.8% were seen and discharged within nine hours.

In the admitted category, 44.6% of patients who needed admission got a hospital bed within six hours. Also, 77.9% of discharged patients were told they could leave within six hours of registration.

“These figures are important. They tell us what is working and they tell us the scale of the challenge,” said Mr O’Brien. He told the committee the number of patients on trolleys had decreased by 20% generally this month. The aim was to make the trolley situation “incrementally better” day by day so the figures, particularly in January, would be “measurably lower” than they were last year.

Acknowledging that some patients were waiting 15 hours or more for a hospital bed, Mr O’Brien said many of the measures recommended by the emergency department taskforce to deal with emergency department overcrowding were longer-term.

A new directive just signed by Health Minister, Leo Varadkar, makes it compulsory for hospitals to take specific steps to tackle extreme overcrowding by implementing an escalation plan.

Hospitals are under threat of having their resources reallocated if they fail to ensure all agreed protocols are followed when a patient is on a trolley for more than nine hours.

“No hospital should be tolerating patients waiting that length of time unless they had exhausted all of the opportunities at their disposal”, said Mr O’Brien, who has asked the special delivery unit at the Department of Health to take a key role in ensuring adherence to the directive.

HSE national director of the acute hospitals division, Liam Woods, said 206 of the 301 additional hospital beds would be open this week, with the number increasing to 294 in January. By the end of the week, 111 of the 154 closed beds will be open he said.