Nurses call for emergency status as trolley numbers rise

MORE than 660 people were left waiting on trolleys across Ireland yesterday – including ten children.

Yesterday the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation called for the first two weeks of March to be declared an emergency period in the health service following the worst snowstorm in 35 years.

A total of 664 people were left waiting on trolleys yesterday – according to the INMO’s Trolley Watch figures – the third highest figure ever recorded. The number includes seven children in Temple Street and three children in Crumlin.

On January 3, 677 patients were on trolleys. Later that month, on January 23, 668 patients lay waiting for a bed.

The INMO said its headcount was yesterday at its worst at Cork University Hospital, where 63 people were on trolleys. A spokesman for the South/South West Hospital Group told the Irish Daily Mail that the Cork facility had experienced increased demand due to the adverse weather of the last few days. The spokesman added that every effort was being made to increase capacity for inpatient admissions.

The number of people on trolleys last month was 19% higher than February 2017.

Yesterday the INMO called for the next two weeks to be afforded ‘emergency status’.

INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said: ‘This means extraordinary measures should be put in place to focus on recovering from this adverse weather event, ensuring prioritisation of emergency care and this will require all non-urgent and routine cases to be cancelled during this period.’

The HSE said the issues raised by the INMO are being considered in ongoing planning. ‘There is a full block of recovery planning ongoing at the moment, and to put a scale on it, we are looking at a period of up to two weeks until normal services resume,’ a HSE spokesman said.

The HSE said there had been a 41% reduction in attendances at emergency departments during Storm Emma.

Yesterday Taoiseach Leo Varadkar warned that hospitals would be under pressure this week as they worked through backlogs in discharging patients. ‘It’s going to take about seven to ten days to get through the backlog,’ he said.

More than 660 left waiting