Promises to end trolley crisis unwise, Varadkar says

Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has said it would be unwise for any politician to promise to eliminate entirely the problem of hospital patients having to wait on trolleys.

Speaking as the numbers on trolleys reached 516 according to figures compiled by nurses, the Minister said no health system had managed to completely deal with this problem.

“Anybody who makes such promises does not understand the true complexity of what we face in the health service,” he said.

Mr Varadkar accepted that Fine Gael had pledged to deal with the trolley problem during the 2007 election campaign.

Mr Varadkar said the trolley situation was in a better than this time last year but was not a problem that was going to be solved quickly.

The week after the Christmas break is normally a very busy period in hospital emergency departments and a spike in numbers on trolleys is usual, and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said there were 516 patients on trolleys in hospitals across the country at present awaiting a bed.

At this stage in 2015 there were over 600 patients on trolleys in hospitals , according to the INMO’s figures. .

It said there were 409 patients on trolleys in hospital emergency departments and a further 107 on trolleys in wards.

Among the hospitals with the highest numbers were St Vincent’s in Dublin, where there were 37 patients on trolleys, and Beaumont where there were 30.

However, the head of the HSE Tony O'Brien said there were fewer patients on trolleys than those set out in the INMO figures.

He said on Monday that there were 414 patients on trolleys with 198 of these people waiting longer than nine hours. He maintained that on the same day last year there were 461 people on trolleys with 254 waiting longer than nine hours.

Mr Varadkar is visiting six hospital emergency departments across the country on Monday to see the picture for himself.

Over the last year the Government has invested more than €70 million in additional funding to address delayed discharges from hospitals of patients who have completed the acute phase of their treatment as well as to relieve pressure on the Fair Deal nursing home scheme. Both of these issues are generally seen to contribute to the problem of high numbers of patients on trolleys.