Irish Examiner view: Trolley crisis doesn’t have to be norm

The achievement at University Hospital Waterford has come under close scrutiny, and there are hopes it can inspire a reduction in hospital overcrowding elsewhere.

University Hospital Waterford has gone without patients on hospital trolleys since March 2020. Picture: Denis Minihane

It’s informative that University Hospital Waterford has not had patients on trolleys since March 2020, as readers learned yesterday — informative in the sense that such news is now worthy of a headline.

We have become almost inured to the increasing numbers of patients now accommodated on hospital trolleys, a constantly rising figure in news reports for years, to the extent that those numbers have become almost normalised.