UHL tops trolley list again as 510 patients waiting for hospital beds

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation is reporting 428 patients are waiting for beds in emergency departments, while 82 are in wards elsewhere in hospitals.

There are 510 patients currently on trolleys in hospitals across the country with almost 20% of these located in University Hospital Limerick (UHL).

According to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation is reporting 428 patients are waiting for beds in emergency departments, while 82 are in wards elsewhere in hospitals.

UHL once again has the highest number of patients admitted and waiting for beds.

There are 63 people currently on trolleys in the emergency department while 33 are in wards elsewhere in the hospital, totalling 96 waiting for beds.

Cork University Hospital (CUH) has the second-highest number of patients on trolleys with all 46 patients waiting on beds in the emergency department.

Staying in Cork, the Mercy University Hospital in the city centre has just nine admitted patients awaiting beds. All of these are on trolleys in the hospitals emergency department.

Following CUH in Cork, University Hospital Galway has 34 patients waiting for hospital beds, Sligo University Hospital has 33 and St Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin has 31.

The waiting patients in these hospitals are all on trolleys in emergency departments.

Meanwhile, new figures show that more than 1,000 older people waited for more than a day for a hospital bed in January.

Numbers from the HSE show that in January alone, some 1,093 people aged over-75 waited at least 24 hours for admission to a hospital bed, with 173 of those in  CUH, the worst affected hospital.

In addition to Cork, St Vincent's (119) and UHL (109) are above 100 cases, while the pressure is also acute in the Mercy University Hospital, which saw 76 over-75s waiting for a bed for longer than 24 hours.