A&E crisis needs urgent action not more reviews and taskforces

I AM relieved to note that the 10-year-old A&E crisis has at last been recognised as an emergency by the Tánaiste and Health Minister Mary Harney and the Health Service Executive.

We have had a capacity problem in our hospital services since the early 1990s. This deficit has manifested itself in overcrowding and delays in A&E units as well as unacceptably long waiting lists for elective admissions. Now that the reality of this longstanding emergency has at last been recognised, let us hope we will not engage in a time-wasting and debilitating exercise of endless taskforces and reviews to avoid taking decisive decisions to relieve the crisis.

A comprehensive bed-stock review was published in 2001 and the National Health Strategy of the same year targeted an increase of 3,000 acute hospital beds over a 10-year period. Today, we are nowhere near delivering on this target. Instead, we are embarking on further studies of acute bed capacity requirements.