Hospital staff are bracing themselves for an avalanche of work once the nurses' strike ends.
A huge backlog of work has built up and will continue to mount until the health services are fully restored.
The Irish Hospital Consultants' Association (IHCA) says that even if settlement proposals are accepted today and the nurses return to work this week, hospitals will face 70,000 postponed out-patient admissions, 9,000 elective admissions and an undetermined number of accident and emergency (A&E) patients.
Emergency departments deal with an average of 4,000 patients a week. This figure rises at this time of the year as the arrival of cold weather results in increased admissions.
The IHCA secretary-general, Mr Finbarr Fitzpatrick, said most of these emergency patients had been dealt with by GPs during the nurses' strike, but his members were expecting greater numbers after the strike. One in five A&E patients would be admitted as in-patients.
With 57 new cancer patients diagnosed in the State every day, cancer treatment hospitals will be particularly hard hit when the strike ends.
The Irish Cancer Society said it wanted hospital managers to consider introducing overtime arrangements to work through the backlog. A spokesman said he was concerned that people might be discharged sooner than normal to reduce waiting lists.
At St Luke's Hospital in Dublin, the national cancer referral centre, more than 512 patients whose outpatient appointments have been deferred will be added to fresh waiting lists once the strike finally ends.
Calls by hospital management for St Luke's to be exempted from the strike were rejected this week by the Irish Nurses' Organisation.
In the day ward, where patients receive pain relief and chemotherapy, more than half of the scheduled appointments have been cancelled due to the strike.
Patients undergoing post-operative radiotherapy treatment usually face a four-week wait for a bed, and this is likely to increase to up to six weeks, according to consultants.
Dr Ian Fraser, a consultant radiation oncologist who works in various hospitals including St Luke's, said additional delays would have a serious impact on the psychological well-being of patients.
Even before the strike, the general shortage of nurses in the State meant that the hospital worked with 30 per cent less than its full quota of nursing staff, he said.
There are normally 30 nurses in the hospital, but during the strike it has been managing on five, plus a further two described by a spokesman for the hospital as "floating".
Dr Fraser, who stressed that he sympathised with the nurses' claim, said the "avalanche of two weeks' build-up of patients is days away, and when it happens, it is not going to be pleasant.
"We are operating in a bit of a vacuum because we don't know what's going on. When the strike ends, we will see what comes through the system. I am dreading the end of this. It really is going to be a difficult time."
Dr Fraser said that with the vast majority of cancers, he has never seen a condition going from curable to incurable within two weeks. He expected that patients whose appointments had been cancelled would be rescheduled according to their priorities and slotted in to clinics.
Dr Peter O'Connor, the Mater's A&E consultant, said he expected people whose out-patient appointments had been cancelled to come to his department when the strike was over. The casualty workload had returned to normal, following a drop-off in the early days of the strike when patients were advised to bring non-urgent complaints to their family doctors.
"The main worry is that there's a bow wave of work building up, from out-patients and from people in the community," he said.