Pressure on hospitals from the surge in Covid-19 and other respiratory viruses is of “huge concern”, a senior Health Service Executive (HSE) official said on Tuesday.
Dr Colm Henry, HSE chief clinical officer, said hospitals were battling a “really serious surge in cases of Covid and also influenza”, which was expected to get worse over the coming days and weeks.
There were 269 patients waiting in emergency departments to be admitted to hospital beds on Tuesday morning, up from 200 the day before.
This was more than double the 105 patients waiting in emergency departments on the same day last year, according to internal HSE figures.
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The number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals increased to 677 on Monday night, up from 524 patients with the virus in hospitals days beforehand.
The upward trajectory of flu cases closely matches the 2019 flu season, which saw the highest number of cases and hospitalisations in the past six years. There was “no sense” of this wave of flu cases peaking yet, Dr Henry said.
The HSE’s national crisis management team, set up to manage the response to the winter surge of respiratory illnesses, met on Tuesday. Health authorities are continuing to examine what measures can be taken to relieve some of the strain landing on hospitals and emergency departments, which is due to get worse over the next fortnight.
General Practitioners have been called on to work extra hours over the next four weeks to help the health service cope with the pressure on hospitals.
The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) said in correspondence to GPs on December 23rd that extra supports were being offered to community doctors who had the capacity to keep their practices open later into the evenings and on Saturdays. It asked GPs to consider staying open until 7pm on weekdays and from 9am-1pm on Saturdays.
The proposal followed a meeting between the IMO and HSE on how to take some pressure off of hospitals at present.
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The HSE had agreed to provide additional funding for GPs to run more clinics during the current “exceptional period” facing the health service until February 3rd, it said.
The HSE also committed to provide more funding to out-of-hours GP services, to allow them to roster extra doctors from 6pm-10pm.
The IMO said the HSE hoped an extra 100 doctors could be encouraged to work in out-of-hours services during the coming weeks as a result of the extra funding.
Dr William Behan, a GP in Walkinstown, Dublin 12, said many community doctors were “burnt out” and did not have much scope to increase their workload at present.
His practice had seen a “threefold” increase in the number of appointments for children in the past two weeks, nearly all with viral and respiratory illnesses, he said.
There was also “definitely” an increase in Covid-19 infections in the community, he said.
While only “the odd older person” was getting sick from Covid-19 due to widespread vaccination coverage, they were at greater risk from other illnesses such as the flu or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), he added.
Dr Diarmuid Quinlan, medical director of the Irish College of General Practitioners, said an underlying problem was the underfunding of primary care. A GP in Co Cork, he said community doctors were in a worse position now than five years ago.
“I know from our own practice here in Glanmire that we are exceptionally busy, that’s the simple reality of it. We generally find most days we have more requests for appointments than we have actual appointments and the numbers wanting to be seen are rising all the time,” he said.
“It’s getting increasingly busy across the whole health service, primary care and secondary care and it comes to us first and then over to the hospitals, but I don’t send people into hospital unless they need to be admitted and I tell them to expect a long wait to be admitted,” Dr Quinlan said.
