Coronavirus patients could be moved out of Dublin if hospital capacity exceeded

Intensive care units in a number of the capital’s hospitals are at capacity

Critically-ill coronavirus patient may be transferred from Dublin to other hospitals if intensive care capacity is exceeded in the capital, a senior HSE official said.

National director of acute operations at the HSE, Liam Woods, was responding to concerns raised by medics in several Dublin hospitals that they were running out of beds in ICU units.

Mr Woods said the issues related to traditional ICU capacity and stressed that there were surge plans in each hospital to increase critical care capacity by utilising high dependency units.

He said baseline ICU capacity across Ireland was 312 beds, but that number was set to rise to 812 under surge planning. He said the plans depended on training up staff and securing more ventilators.

HSE Director of Acute Operations Liam Woods said all hospitals had surge plans to treat critically ill patients outside of ICUs (Brian Lawless/PA)

But he said if that extra capacity was also exceeded as the outbreak progresses, then patients may be moved elsewhere in the country.

Mr Woods said other cities were not experiencing similar pressures on ICU capacity and he noted that 138 intensive care beds were empty nationally as of Tuesday.

He highlighted that critical care patients are already moved between hospitals in normal circumstances, though he acknowledged that movement was usually towards Dublin, not away from it.

“Some of the surge capacity that is available is still available in Dublin,” he said at the National Public Health Emergency team media briefing on Wednesday.

“Is there a point in time at which one will consider potentially moving patients from Dublin? Of course, if the situation became particularly challenged that will be an option.

“It’s not happening at the moment because it’s not necessary at the moment, but should the situation arise, it is something we will look at and individual hospitals would engage with.”

Earlier on Wednesday, a senior medic at the Mater hospital in Dublin said the ICU unit was full and some patients had been moved to the high dependency unit.

The director of critical care medicine at The Mater Misericordiae University Hospital said that most of those in the ICU beds are Covid-19 patients.

Dr O’Loughlin said: “We were lucky in this Covid (-19) crisis that we had a lead-in time to allow us to kind of shut down the normal activity of the hospital and free up a lot of spare capacity that exists in the hospital.

“That has allowed us to build a plan for surge one, surge two, surge three, and surge four etc, so we can act on those plans as the surge comes in," he said, speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland