Government must declare 'capacity emergency' at UHL, hospital's medical board warns

'There’s a lack of capacity' at University Hospital Limerick. Picture: Dan Linehan

The Government needs to “urgently change” its approach to hospital overcrowding in Limerick, and a "capacity emergency" needs to be declared as patients continue to face “reduced privacy and dignity” compared to elsewhere, doctors have warned.

The call from doctors on the University Hospital Limerick medical board follows findings in Hiqa’s review of emergency services in the region, published last month.

“It would be helpful for Limerick to be regarded as a capacity emergency,” Dr Joe Devlin, deputy chairman of the medical board, said today.

“That is really what this Hiqa report says — there’s a lack of capacity. It’s unequal, and very different to every other part of the country. 

"Hiqa stated baldly this is posing a risk to patient safety, so if you don’t regard that as an emergency, I don’t know what is.” 

Health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has pledged to respond to three solutions proposed by Hiqa by Christmas, and to look at bed shortages in the interim.

Dr Devlin said it was clear during the pandemic that construction could happen quickly in health if necessary. He called for a similar approach for the Mid-West.

“Why should the children in the Mid-West have less access to emergency healthcare than the children in the North-West, or the South-West, or in Dublin?” he said.

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The medical board said that the Hiqa review is the third investigation or review to find overcrowding to be a real problem since the death of Aoife Johnston in 2022, but that little has changed.

Aoife Johnston, aged 16, died on December 19, 2022, from meningitis-related sepsis after waiting for treatment in the emergency department of UHL.

“We hope to no longer hear the HSE or the Department of Health blame staff in HSE Midwest for problems that have yet again been clearly identified as those of physical bed capacity,” the board stated.

It highlighted “the privacy and dignity deficiencies our patients experience”, and stressed that Hiqa found staff still deliver more care than in other hospitals despite having fewer beds and working "in an inappropriately overcrowded environment". 

Dr Devlin pointed out while hospitals such as Cork University Hospital have ready support from smaller hospitals locally at Model 3 level, UHL does not.

The board stated: “The direction from Government on this critical point needs to urgently change."