The number of patients on trolleys and chairs in hospital A&E units had risen by 80 per cent in the last 12 months and the problem was going "from bad to worse", Fine Gael claimed in the Dáil yesterday.
Party leader Enda Kenny said there were 392 patients in this situation on Tuesday, 174 more than on the same day last year, "which was considered at the time to be a crisis".
Mr Kenny claimed that Minister for Health Mary Harney "now seems to have abandoned any work on A&E units, deciding instead to focus her energies elsewhere".
The Mayo TD also highlighted the fact that minor injury units had been set up in private hospitals but not in public hospitals.
However, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern rejected the criticism and staunchly defended the Government's response to overcrowding. He said huge improvements had taken place since last year, and while there were people on waiting lists and trolleys, "a wide-ranging approach has been adopted by the Health Service Executive to try to improve access to accident and emergency services".
Mr Kenny said that while the number of people attending A&E units had hardly changed since 1988, the number of people on trolleys and chairs was increasing. He pointed out that on April 12th last year the Taoiseach had said A&E facilities were "not up to scratch", but he had expressed confidence at that time that the Tánaiste's "much-vaunted €70 million programme" would deliver improvements.
"She told us in 2004 that we would see improvements by March 2005. In January 2005, she told us there would be significant improvements by the end of that year," he said.
A total of 75 people were on on trolleys in Tallaght Hospital yesterday, 22 at the Mater, 25 at Beaumont, 28 at St James's, 26 at Cavan General, 25 at Letterkenny General and 37 at two hospitals in Cork, Mr Kenny claimed. "Even though we have trebled our expenditure on the health service, the problems in A&E units are going from bad to worse. Will the Taoiseach admit that the Tánaiste's disjointed and incremental plan has failed, that no system of comprehensive response to this crisis has been put in place and that the key stakeholders have not been consulted?"
Mr Kenny called on the Government to appoint a "respected member of the health profession to call together the key stakeholders".
The Taoiseach replied that dedicated people in the HSE were co-ordinating their efforts with A&E units every day. An initiative in the A&E department in Kilkenny had been successful and the person who devised it had been put on the national service. He added: "We put in funding for 900 in-patient beds in acute hospitals and that is having an effect. We put in facilities to improve patient flow and we obtained extra staff in almost every A&E unit."
