Nurses have condemned a plan drawn up by Dublin's Beaumont Hospital to place trolleys on each of 16 wards in the hospital to accommodate extra patients whenever there is severe overcrowding in its A&E unit.
Details of the plan were revealed at an Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) special delegate conference at Croke Park yesterday. Mairead Lyons, a nurse at the hospital, said that while there had been talk of putting extra beds on wards to relieve pressure in A&E, it had transpired it wasn't extra beds but extra trolleys.
"It's not beds they are trying to put up. It's a trolley behind a door because it's the only thing that will fit," she said. She added that private wards in the hospital would not be affected.
The plan will come into effect whenever there are more than 25 patients on trolleys in the A&E department.
More than 300 nurses attending the INO conference voted to resist all attempts by hospitals to place extra beds on wards this winter to relieve the situation in A&E.
They said this would merely "hide" the A&E problem. The plan was approved earlier this year by Minister for Health Mary Harney.
Paddy Gallagher, an A&E nurse at Beaumont, said the proposal would only serve to ensure that all wards, and not just the A&E department, were overcrowded.
INO president Madeline Spiers said the crisis in A&E had continued all summer, and it now appeared, despite promises, that no immediate improvement could be expected.
The plan to put extra beds on wards would look good politically but it made infections spreading between patients more likely.
Joe Hoolan, a nurse in the midlands, said it was time for the INO to step up its "Enough is Enough" campaign. The campaign, which began last spring, led to protests outside A&E units and the publishing of daily figures for numbers of patients on trolleys across the State by the INO.
"There is a winter coming and this really is now a matter of life and death," he said.
Liam Doran, the INO's general secretary, said Mary Harney's 10-point plan to tackle the A&E crisis had failed to make any real improvement.
He said the INO had identified 480 hospital beds closed due to employment ceilings and other "bureaucratic reasons", and these had to be reopened.
Delegates voted unanimously to start another campaign to have the A&E crisis addressed. They are being backed in principle by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
As part of the campaign, patients will be asked to bombard Mary Harney with postcards highlighting the problem. Public representatives will be lobbied and asked for their views on the A&E crisis, and these will be published.
There will also be an investigation into whether or not the State is breaching patients' human rights by failing to ensure they are treated in privacy and with dignity in A&E.
The conference heard that the row over the introduction of healthcare assistant grades has been resolved. A high-level group, to report shortly, had agreed that the issue of delegating duties to healthcare assistants is a matter for individual nurses.
INO delegates also voted yesterday to withdraw from benchmarking, because they say the terms of reference for the second benchmarking exercise will not address their claim for a 35-hour week.
They will pursue their claims instead through industrial relations channels.