University Hospital Limerick has a “management issue, a clinical leadership issue and a capacity issue” that is resulting in the consistent overcrowding at the facility, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said.
Last week, the UL Hospital Group announced there would be a “significant” reduction in scheduled care across five hospitals in the midwest region in order to “de-escalate” the strain on Ireland’s most overcrowded hospital.
The two-week “reset” was recommended by a support group which spent time in UHL and which identified a number of issues contributing to the high number of patients on trolleys in the healthcare facility.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr Donnelly said “more and more hospitals are seeing very few patients on trolleys” but said “we have a major problem in UHL”.
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“As Hiqa [the health information and quality authority] have pointed out, in UHL – not exclusively but in UHL most prominently, the kind of reforms that have worked in other hospitals are not fully rolled out in UHL,” he said.
“There’s a lot of reasons for that. I think partly they’ve been under so much pressure for so long, and it is simply more difficult to do reform when you’re firefighting”.
Mr Donnelly acknowledged many of the staff in the hospital are likely to be feeling burnt out, but he said there was a need for more senior decision makers, such as consultants, to be in the hospital at weekends, and evenings.
“Take the bank holiday that’s just gone by. Unfortunately, in UHL, while the discharge rate on the Saturday and the Sunday was good, it fell off on the Monday and it fell off on the Tuesday in a way it shouldn’t have and in a way that it didn’t in other hospitals,” he said.
“So there is a management issue, there is a clinical leadership issue and there is a capacity issue.”
The decision to postpone scheduled care was criticised by the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association (IHCA), who said it was an “abandonment of the people” in the midwest.
However, Bernard Gloster, chief executive of the HSE, told The Irish Times that there were a “lot of exemptions” to the postponement of scheduled care, adding that consequences of this action are “better than the alternative” which could see acutely ill patients waiting longer than appropriate for medical treatment due to bed shortages.
Separately, a report by former chief justice Frank Clarke into the death of 16-year-old Aoife Johnston, who died in UHL after waiting more than 15 hours for antibiotics, has been completed and is with senior HSE officials.
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