HSE's €77m winter plan labelled a 'sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound'
A sign in Naas, Co Kildare, warning people to take care amid rising Covid-19 cases. Picture: Eamonn Farrell/RollingNews.ie
The HSE winter plan sets aside €77m in an effort to give patients better access to primary care, and boost hospital capacity as another challenging winter begins.
It was welcomed by some health bodies, but the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) described it as “a sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound” in light of the challenges facing the sector.
Among the proposed benefits for patients are an additional 205 hospital beds across the system, access to 1,100 private bed-days per week, 275 community beds and 100 extra private community beds.
Funding of €10m is set aside to continue providing direct access to scans, including MRIs, for GP patients with a target of 4,000 each week to be provided. Since this scheme started earlier this year, a total of 83,315 diagnostic scans have been carried out.
An additional 2.7m home support hours will be made available, with the plan citing this should meet pressures caused by price increases in the sector.
The plan also included €4m for disability services, €1m for mental health services and €4.1m for older people’s services.
The document states: “The winter plan is a short-term tactical plan which aims to mitigate winter pressures.”
It says a key challenge is continuing to care for Covid patients while opening up non-Covid care and catching on the backlog of treatments caused during the pandemic and cyberattack.
The document acknowledges the growing number of patients on trolleys in hospitals who cannot get a bed, and says it hopes to address these delays.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) trolley watch for Monday showed 401 people on trolleys waiting to be given a hospital bed.
A section of the Winter Plan based on this INMO daily data shows Cork University Hospital accounted for 8.6% of all patients on trolleys over the last eight weeks.
University Hospital Kerry accounted for 6%, and Mercy University Hospital 5.7%, with the largest number of patients on trolleys in Galway University Hospital at 12.9%.
The winter plan also provides funding of €5.7m to the National Ambulance Service for the Pathfinder programme, which treats patients at home and reduces attendances at emergency departments.
The IMO warned hospital waiting lists would exceed 1m patients within the coming months.
“The winter plan is like using a sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound,” IMO president Dr Ina Kelly said.
“Our health services remain crippled by a lack of bed capacity on the one hand and a lack of doctors and other healthcare professionals on the other and until we fix these two problems, we will forever be trying to prevent a crisis becoming a catastrophe.”
The INMO cautiously welcomed the plan.
“We need urgent action to use all available bed capacity in private hospitals to divert appropriate care from our acute hospitals,” deputy general secretary designate Edward Mathews said.
“Our acute hospitals are not just full, they are overcrowded, so surge capacity from the private sector to alleviate the pressure in hospitals across the country is imperative.
“The number of people on trolleys is increasing, Covid cases and hospitalisations are on the rise and nearly 1m people are on waiting lists.”
The plan also includes a spend of €20.1m to maintain the SafetyNET series of agreements with private hospitals, which has seen many patients avoid long waiting lists for public care.
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