HOSPITAL HID TROLLEY PATIENTS FOR LEO VISIT
A HOSPITAL has been blasted for hiding patients when the Taoiseach visited – to minimise the scale of its overcrowding crisis.
Fianna Fail’s Seanad health spokesman and family GP Keith Swanick said the “massaging of figures” and moving patients to inappropriate areas to mask the extent of the problem was worrying and dangerous.
Trolleywatch figures from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation show the numbers waiting on trolleys at University Hospital Galway fell from 58 on Wednesday to 26 on Thursday, the day Leo Varadkar visited.
Numbers crept up to 36 yesterday. The INMO said the hospital hid the scale of the crisis on Thursday by reopening a closed ward in advance of the Taoiseach’s visit and by temporarily housing patients in the Medical Assessment Unit, normally used to ease pressure on the emergency department.
The INMO said the MAU, which had been shut for three weeks, suddenly reopened on Tuesday night – two days before the Taoiseach arrived. Senator Swanick told the Irish Mirror: “It appears the hospital were trying to hide the patients here, but they’re fooling nobody only themselves.
“The public are well aware of the core issue here, and that is that there is still a massive problem of overcrowding that doesn’t go away just because the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arrived at the UHG facility on Thursday comes to town. However, the fact they moved patients into the Medical Assessment Unit is extremely worrying. “That’s a unit that’s supposed to be used to prevent people having to go into the A&E, it’s meant to be a day unit.” An HSE spokesman said last night the emergency department had been “extremely busy with a high number of patients attending” since Monday, April 8.
He added that “full capacity protocol” had been operating all week and remained in place at 8am yesterday with “19 patients awaiting admission in the ED and 12 accommodated on ward trolleys”.