A&E closure - Idle unit a monument to incompetence

The Accident and Emergency facilities at Cork University Hospital were closed for a time yesterday by the consultant in charge, because of the ongoing shortage of nurses there. At that point there were 30 patients on trolleys.

The department refused to admit all but emergency cases.

The department re-opened in the afternoon after several hours. New A&E facilities were officially opened at the hospital by Micheál Martin and Mary Harney, but these have been idle for almost a year, because the hospital has been unable to recruit the extra staff to run the facilities.

Even though the new facilities cost €17 million, the money to pay the extra staff to run them was only allocated recently.

Politicians are notorious for exploiting official openings for their own political purposes, but one does assume that when something is opened that it is ready to function. The people of Cork have now been deceived twice. This is a blistering indication of the incompetence of the Health Department and of the two ministers.

The Irish Nurses Organisation contends that the current overcrowding will continue, because it is largely due to archaic administrative procedures that are not being changed.

Instead of being a centre of excellence, the unused facilities are just a monument to bureaucratic bungling and administrative inefficiency.