The accident and emergency taskforce, which was set up earlier this year to try to come up with solutions to end overcrowding in hospital emergency departments, will say in its final report that bed capacity is a problem in a number of hospitals.
It will also state that solutions need to be found to ongoing issues that delay the discharge of patients from a number of Dublin hospitals, in particular.
The report is expected to be published in a few weeks.
Members of the taskforce, which is chaired by Angela Fitzgerald of the HSE, visited hospitals around the country to see the problems in A&E for themselves.
While a member of the taskforce told The Irish Times that its report was now finished and with the HSE, a spokesman for the HSE claimed yesterday it had yet to be finalised. However, he said he expected the report to be complete and ready for publication in a few weeks.
The taskforce was set up last March. Prior to addressing its first meeting, Minister for Health Mary Harney said the A&E problem had to be treated as a national emergency.
Figures collected by the HSE itself yesterday afternoon indicate that patients are still spending hours on trolleys in A&E. They show there were 164 people on trolleys yesterday afternoon and 47 of these patients were waiting between six and 12 hours for a bed, 49 were waiting between 12 and 24 hours and 18 were waiting for a bed for more than 24 hours.
Dr William Binchy, secretary of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine, said hospitals were waiting with bated breath to see what the A&E taskforce comes up with.
He said that over recent months there had been improvements in the numbers waiting in A&E in a number of hospitals, but he said the improvements weren't universal.
"There is a long way to go yet," Dr Binchy said.