THE HSE has sent two high-ranking executives to help resolve the continuing problems at the A&E department of the largest hospital in the west of Ireland.
National director of operations, Laverne McGuiness, and director of operations for HSE West, John Hennessy, met senior hospital management at Galway University Hospital (GUH) last week.
The chairman of the HSE West Forum, Cllr Padraig Conneely (FG), said: “I very much welcome now that a high-powered HSE committee is going in there to sort it out.”
At a meeting of the HSE West Forum last week, Mr Hennessy said the HSE was “very concerned about the national performance of the AE at the hospital”.
The most recent Healthstat figures available for January show that more than 50 per cent of people faced waits of 12-24 hours to be admitted through the A&E.
National director of the HSE, John O’Brien, told the meeting that the problems at the hospital could be sorted out in a matter of weeks if there was a willingness to address them.
Mr O’Brien said the problems must be solved internally, pointing out that it had fewer AE cases than Limerick or Waterford Regional Hospitals last year.“It is not a resource issue. The solutions lie within,” he said.
However, industrial relations officer for HSE West with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, Noreen Muldoon, said yesterday: “Over 100 beds have been lost between UCHG and Merlin Park. If that is not a resource issue, I don’t know what is.”
She added that the moratorium on staff recruitment had left the hospital short-staffed.
The hospital has a combined budget with Merlin Park hospital of €247 million this year.
In a statement after last week’s meeting between the HSE and hospital management, clinical director for medicine in GUH, Dr Pat Nash, said: “Our goal is to ensure that seriously ill patients do not have to wait to get an inpatient bed. We have been reorganising and rearranging our services so that we can treat and assess more people outside of the ED .”
