Trolley misery to worsen as new beds are delayed
HOSPITALS struggling to cope with the trolley crisis and facing another winter of overcrowding will have to wait until early next year for new beds, it emerged yesterday.
Patients will have to suffer through the coming months of escalating delays on trolleys before urgently needed relief in the form of extra beds comes on stream.
It will be the first quarter of 2019 before the additional 80 will be available.
These include an additional 30-bed ward in Our Lady of Lourdes, Drogheda and a 40-bed modular ward block in South Tipperary General Hospital.
The plan is to install four high-dependency beds in the Mater Hospital and Cork University Hospital.
Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital has been promised a new emergency department early next year.
Although 600 beds are promised, they will have to be phased in over the course of more than two years.
The delay will provide little
room for manoeuvre with hospitals already seeing a rise in patients on trolleys.
Figures obtained by Fianna Fáil health spokesman Stephen Donnelly have already revealed that nearly 10,000 patients over the age of 75 were on trolleys for a full day or longer in the first eight months of the year.
There was a €10m allocation in the Budget for the opening of new beds.
Around €10m extra is being spent on the winter initiative, which will also aim to provide more community facilities for older patients – but this will also not become available until early next year. The fear is that the record levels of overcrowding, which led to daily misery for patients, will escalate this winter.
There were 2,408 patients on trolleys during the first week of 2018 – a 10pc rise on the same week in 2017.
Meanwhile, Nursing Homes Ireland, which represents private nursing homes, announced it has 1,200 beds available across the country.
Tadhg Daly, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “Our health service providers must engage in meaningful, consistent engagement with nursing homes across the country in order to achieve optimum outcomes for older people who are availing of care in acute hospitals.
“Private and voluntary nursing homes are essential to meet specialist healthcare needs, with almost 9,000 people transferring from our acute hospitals to such nursing homes for transitional care last year.
“Day-to-day engagement between staff responsible for patient discharges and nursing homes is imperative.”