One of the State's leading emergency medicine consultants claims that the crisis affecting acute hospitals is unlikely to be resolved "for decades".
Dr Aidan Gleeson, a consultant in emergency medicine at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, who is also secretary of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine, said he believed that the crisis would not be solved in his lifetime. "The political will just isn't there," he claimed.
Dr Gleeson said that successive governments had "dodged" problems facing the health service. The vast majority of medical staff in Irish hospitals were working as hard as they could, but their ability to provide an adequate health service had been hampered by a chronic lack of investment.
"At this time of year we get a lot more cases involving problems like chest infections, and the elderly generally have a more difficult time, but the problem of having patients waiting for beds on trolleys is a year-round one."
Dr Gleeson said that patients were often forced to wait on trolleys for 24 hours before a hospital bed became available.
In addition, Accident and Emergency departments could often be "very violent \ at night, with lots of drunk, aggressive and often psychiatrically ill patients". He added: "People waiting for beds should not have to witness that."
Up to 3,000 extra hospital beds were needed throughout the State, along with the staff to man them, if the pressure on the health service was to be alleviated, he said.
He added that the Eastern Regional Health Authority should be more willing to fund the transfer of patients into nursing homes. If the ERHA and other health authorities adopted a more proactive role in helping to free up beds, this would greatly alleviate the pressure on hospitals.
