A SENIOR administrator at the Mercy University Hospital has rejected suggestions by Minister for Health Mary Harney that the hospital is holding the HSE to ransom over the opening of the new €4.7 million emergency department because of its demand for extra staff.
The director of nursing at the hospital, Mary Dunnion, said management and staff at the hospital did not share Ms Harney's view that it was a simple matter of staff transferring from the existing 208sq m (2,200sq ft) emergency department to the new 756sq m (8,137sq ft) facility.
On Monday during a visit to Cork, Ms Harney ruled out providing an additional €1.5 million, which the hospital says it needs to recruit an extra 25 staff to run the new emergency facility, and she said such a request was "unjustified".
Ms Harney appealed to staff at the hospital to move into the new emergency department, which was completed in March 2007 but has remained unopened, and said it was the patients in Cork who were suffering as a consequence.
But yesterday, Ms Dunnion pointed out that it was not possible for the hospital to open the new facility without extra staff and she said this was known by both the Department of Health and the HSE when they were involved in planning the new facility with Mercy management. Ms Dunnion said the new facility was not only three times the size of the existing facility but it also had two separate access points - one for serious casualties and one for people with minor injuries.
This required two separate admissions staff, while the new facility also had a separate children's emergency room and a psychiatric unit, and the number of resuscitation rooms had been increased from one in the existing facility to two in the new unit.
The existing emergency department was cramped and overcrowded and catered for 25,000 patients a year, while the new facility had the capacity for dealing with more than 30,000 patients annually to take account of an annual increase in attendance of about 4 per cent, she said.
Ms Dunnion said the hospital had pared back staffing requirements for the new facility to the absolute minimum but would require 23 extra staff, including 11 nurses, with the remaining new staff required for administrative and security positions. "We feel the number we are looking for is a reasonable number . . . we have brought it back to its minimum level to ensure that the scale and quality of service that we can deliver on moving to the new department is a safe service."
