A new €4 million hospital emergency department which has lain idle for over nine months could be opened by late February or early March if an external evaluation report due shortly on staffing levels is accepted by both the Health Service Executive (HSE) and hospital management.
The new emergency department at the Mercy University Hospital (MUH) in Cork was completed last March but has remained unopened because of differences between MUH management and the HSE on the extra staff required to operate the facility.
The MUH has argued that it needs an additional 25 staff including about 15 nursing staff to open the new facility which will cater for 34,000 patients annually as opposed to the 24,000 currently being treated in the hospital's existing emergency department but the health service has questioned the extra staff figures.
However, both sides agreed in November to have an external evaluation carried out and a MUH spokesman confirmed to The Irish Times this week that the evaluation was carried out on December 7th and that the report on the evaluation process was imminent.
"The report will be sent first to the health service which in turn will forward it to the Mercy University Hospital - hopefully everything will be satisfactory in terms of the staff numbers and the plan then is to open the facility as soon as possible which would be late February or early March to allow for recruitment."
The news that the evaluation report is imminent comes as one of the emergency medicine consultants at the MUH, Dr Chris Luke, pleaded with the HSE to move as quickly as possible to try to resolve the issue and open the new facility which he says is badly need to alleviate congestion.
"We are desperate for the new emergency department at the Mercy to open - the existing emergency department at the Mercy, like that at Cork University Hospital, is terribly overloaded and overcrowded with patients on the corridors waiting for admission," said Dr Luke.
"The existing emergency department is a nightmare to try to work in and staff are in despair at the continuing difficulty of trying to treat patients in a dilapidated and overcrowded facility despite the fact that a purpose-built, state-of-the-art emergency department lies idle just a few yards away."
Dr Luke said he wasn't certain when the new MUH emergency department was going to open but cautioned that if it wasn't opened soon, then there was a real risk of emergency department nurses becoming so disillusioned that some would leave as has happened in CUH in the past year.
"It's beyond the power of the hospital to open the new emergency department because of funding issues which reflect years of under-resourcing of the hospital but my concern is that we may be about to hit a vicious circle where the intolerable conditions lead to an exodus of experienced staff.
"That's already started to happen at Cork University Hospital with 40 senior and experienced nurses leaving the emergency department and when you lose trained staff like that who cannot be easily replaced, it leads to even worse conditions for all concerned," said Dr Luke.
Last November, Minister for Health Mary Harney expressed concern that the new emergency department at the MUH was lying idle and she urged both the HSE and MUH management to work out a solution that would allow the facility to be opened as quickly as possible.
"It always worries me if buildings are left vacant . . . there is a duty on all of us to reform the system, not just on the Minister and the HSE, there is a duty on everyone who works in the health system to play their part in delivering better care and better facilities for patients," she said.