{"id":14067,"date":"2025-08-21T14:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T14:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/14067\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T14:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T14:53:09","slug":"430-patients-on-hospital-trolleys-as-iaem-warns-ireland-needs-beds-beds-beds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/14067\/","title":{"rendered":"430 patients on hospital trolleys as IAEM warns Ireland needs \u2018beds, beds, beds\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cBeds, beds, beds\u201d \u2014 that is the demand from the president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM), as 430 patients waited on trolleys on Wednesday during a summer month when such a figure is very high.<\/p>\n<p>The total included 109 patients on trolleys at University Hospital Limerick (UHL), the worst affected.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Cork University Hospital (CUH) was overcrowded with 54 patients without a bed, with three on trolleys at the Mercy Hospital, the count by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation showed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Some 68 patients had been waiting longer than 24 hours for a bed by 8am yesterday, including three aged over 75, separate HSE data showed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Among this group of long-waiters, two were in University Hospital Kerry in Tralee. This hospital was recently the subject of a Hiqa report highlighting potentially unsafe overcrowding.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">At UHL, 20 patients had waited over 24 hours and another 14 people waited this long at Mayo hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">IAEM president and a consultant in emergency medicine at CUH Conor Deasy said there is \u201ca supply and demand mismatch\u201d across hospitals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\n            There is a promise of beds being funded, an expedited delivery would really benefit patients who find themselves being treated on trolleys on corridors.\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">All hospitals are seeing more older patients often with more complex illnesses, and he said \u201csome are not able to access GP services\u201d now. Summing up the urgency, he said the solution is \u201cbeds, beds, beds\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">The last five weeks have also seen a sharp rise in people admitted with covid. By mid-August, 238 covid patients were in hospitals, up from just 80 in early June.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\u201cCovid continues to generate demand,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">In addition, hospital patients may face delays at this time of year as staff take summer holidays, and are replaced by temporary locum workers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\n            We also see delayed admissions and discharges when inpatient colleagues are on leave, and locums may be more risk averse.\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">In February, health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said: \u201cWe are committed to ensuring there are more beds for our hospitals, and to removing some elective procedures from acute hospitals into new surgical hubs, and then elective hospitals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Just weeks ago, she welcomed a \u201csignificant 51% reduction of trolley numbers\u201d over a August bank holiday weekend, compared to St Brigid\u2019s in February. Government statements on this difference did not refer to the impact on hospitals of Storm \u00c9owyn and repeated heavy snowfalls.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Meanwhile, babies born between September 1 and February 29 will benefit from an expanded RSV vaccination campaign in a bid to further reduce cases of this winter infection.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Babies aged up to six months old on September 1 can also benefit, the health minister said yesterday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Last winter\u2019s campaign saw a 65% reduction in case numbers, compared to the winter before, including a 57% drop in babies in emergency departments with RSV. It also led to a 76% reduction in hospitalisations and a 65% reduction in ICU admissions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBeds, beds, beds\u201d \u2014 that is the demand from the president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275],"tags":[18,135,475,474,60,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-14067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-healthcare","12":"tag-hse","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}