Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
HEALTH WARNING
Service is now in a ‘dangerous situation’ & becoming unsafe
A TOP doctor has said someone needs to take charge of Northern Ireland’s health service in the absence of an Executive at Stormont.
Dr Paul Kerr from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine was speaking as Antrim Area Hospital remained under extreme pressure yesterday.
The site was forced to close its doors to new admissions over the weekend because conditions had become unsafe.
On Saturday night, the hospital declared a major incident and issued a statement asking people to “not attend under any circumstances” after it had reached full capacity due to the number of patients needing to be admitted.
Declaring a major incident is rare and a sign a hospital is under extreme pressure.
The Northern Health & Social Care Trust said the decision to close the Emergency Department (ED) was regrettable but it was the only safe response under the circumstances.
Also on Sunday, the Belfast Health Trust appealed for available nursing staff to go to hospitals to help alleviate pressures.
And the Western Trust said Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry was also under extreme pressure yesterday and urged the public only to attend the ED in emergency or lifethreatening situations. Dr Kerr said the region is now “in a dangerous situation” and one that risks becoming unsafe for both patients and staff.
He told the BBC: “We are losing staff and the whole system is propped up by staff.
“So if we don’t have our staff and if staff are leaving or perhaps coming back as agency staff, the costs are increasing and then we can’t do with that money what we should do in terms of increasing capacity in the system. It’s a poor situation.”
He also warned that one hospital closing its doors puts pressure on other hospitals.
“The domino effect occurs in the situation where one hospital says it has to close its doors and the next hospital is going to get more patients and they’re going to face a critical incident.
“It’s a very small system and we have to try and avoid this situation happening because that is going to put us all at risk of being in the same situation.”
Earlier Jennifer Welsh, the Chief Executive at the Northern Trust, said the decision to close Antrim’s A&E on Saturday night was “a last resort”, adding that it has been a very difficult situation for staff to manage.
She said: “We had been running our full capacity protocol and had already brought in additional staff.
REACHED OUT
“ED is actually overstaffed, recognising that we were dealing with a high number of decisions to admit every day. We reached out for help early on Saturday morning.
“We did get help from neighbouring Trusts and the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service.
“We were doing everything that we could to try and deal with this.
This was a last resort.” She added: “It was the right call to say it was unsafe – it was at the time.”
Ms Welsh said there were 45 patients in the ED yesterday morning for whom a decision to admit had been made, but for whom no bed is available.
Last night the South Eastern Health Trust said that 164 patients are in the ED at the Ulster Hospital near Belfast, with 53 waiting to be admitted.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said they remain “deeply concerned about the situation in our hospitals and across the health and social care system”.
They added: “The fundamental reality is that we have a serious mismatch between demand for care and the capacity of the system to provide it. Neighbouring jurisdictions are facing similar challenges.”
Last week, the Royal College of Nursing confirmed nursing staff in NI will walk out over “pay levels and patient safety concerns”.
Rita Devlin from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said the situation in Antrim should be ringing “alarm bells for everyone in Northern Ireland”.