Up to 200 a day attended Emergency Dept over Christmas
It will be the end of the month before the next tranche of beds are opened in the new 75-bed unit due to the difficulty in recruiting staff – which will only further exacerbate overcrowding.
General Manager of University Hospital Galway (UHG) Chris Kane said patients in the infection control ward were moved over to 25 of the single en suite rooms at the end of December. The new unit had been completed in mid-November.
However, plans to open the next 30 beds in the new unit have been put on hold until at least the end of January due to a shortage of staff.
St Dominick’s Ward was next due to be moved to the state-of-the-art unit.
She told Galway Bay FM that hospital management had sought approval for staff to manage 30 beds but will likely only have approval for 23 or 24 beds.
Conditions were again very difficult in the Emergency Department with 200 attendances on some days over the festivities. Many patients were presenting with respiratory and flu-like symptoms, she revealed.
The general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives’ Organisation (INMO) Liam Doran said his members did not blame local management for the severe shortage of staff which was significantly contributing to the overcrowding.
He said that 100 acute beds and over 200 nursing staff were required immediately to alleviate pressure at UHG.
Without improved conditions at the biggest hospital in the region, there would be continued problems attracting new nurses and retaining the ones already there.
Last year there were 80 vacancies for nursing staff in emergency departments nationally. Recent figures showed that had jumped to 140.
“Local management in Galway are dealing with the resources that are given to them. My organisation would say we need 100 more acute beds in Galway, 200-plus board nurses in Galway. Nobody is going to argue against that but nobody has a plan to deliver that . . . in terms of investment in capital infrastructure, building, or investing in staffing infrastructure,” he fumed.
“. . . They’re told they’re over the employment ceiling, they’re over the pay budget . . . all of this bureaucratic rubbish which ignores the reality that dozens of patients every morning are on trolleys and it’s short staffed.”
He predicted the situation with staffing would only get worse, pointing out that any manager had to go through up to eight layers of bureaucracy to get the authority from the national organisation of the Health Service Executive (HSE) to replace any staff member who had left.
“No nurse who has a choice will remain in Galway if they have an option to go elsewhere because of an excessive workload, constant overcrowding and a lack of respect from the health system as a whole towards their needs and their needs mirror the needs of patients which are being neglected – in capital letters – every day,” he complained.
The end of year figures from the INMO show there was an improvement at UHG’s emergency department compared to 2015 – 5,807 patients at UHG endured delays on a trolley as they awaited admission to a ward – down from 6,514 the year before.
A decision on a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed unit was due at the end of last March but an announcement on that decision has been postponed.
Ten years of pumping money into Galway city’s two public hospitals has resulted in fewer beds. The latest financial figures show that €109 million in capital projects had been spent at University Hospital Galway (UHG) and Merlin Park since 2006 while at the same time 157 fewer beds were now in the system.