Patients who need to have their appendix out can be waiting up to 14 hours for surgery at Galway's University College Hospital due to a lack of beds.
The president of the Irish Medical Organisation, Dr Asam Ishtiaq, made the claim yesterday at a press conference in Dublin where he reiterated that bed capacity was at the root of many problems in the health service, including overcrowding in accident and emergency units and the constant cancellation of elective surgery.
"The Government is neglecting its duty, patients are not being looked after, the health system is going down the tubes," he said.
Yet the head of the Health Service Executive (HSE), Prof Brendan Drumm, he said, and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern seemed to blame doctors for the ongoing problems in hospitals, including the crisis in A&E.
They had suggested consultants and GPs were not available after 5pm, which was not the case, he said.
"I personally have to wait at times 12 hours or 14 hours for a patient to get a bed before I can operate even for appendicitis simply because they do not have an inpatient bed," he said. Dr Ishtiaq is a surgeon at UCHG.
He said it was very disappointing that a year after the IMO published a position paper on A&E which contained ideas for solving the crisis, things had got worse.
"The crisis in our A&E departments in the hospital service is an acute bed capacity problem . . . not unless and until we sort out our capacity issues, no amount of moving the chairs around the place, blaming others, getting people to start early days, finishing late days, etc is going to fix the problem," he said.
"Unfortunately our politicians, their heads are stuck in the sand, they are blaming everybody else but themselves . . . I think they will face a very hostile electorate next time."
He believed the setting up of the HSE to replace health boards "may well be a failed experiment".
Dr Ishtiaq was speaking ahead of next week's IMO annual conference in Killarney, Co Kerry.
IMO vice-president Dr Christine O'Malley said there was no A&E problem at Nenagh General Hospital and no problem with patients accessing GPs out of hours in the area, but the hospital was still experiencing overcrowding with beds in corridors.
More acute hospital beds were needed, she insisted.
Prof Drumm has already said the State is massively equipped with hospital beds and that more services in the community are required to keep people out of hospital.
He has asked a group within the HSE to conduct another review of acute-bed capacity.
A review in 2001 found the State needed another 3,000 beds, fewer than one third of which have since been provided.
Meanwhile, the IMO has expressed disappointment that the HSE has not presented it with a new draft GP contract ahead of its annual conference.
It says employers are refusing to offer public health doctors more than €3 extra an hour to provide an out-of-hours service to deal with outbreaks of a range of conditions, including a possible outbreak of avian flu.