Such is the state of the health system that patients "on the sickest day of their life" are unable to get into hospital and if they do they invariably have to spend 12 hours or more on a trolley, consultants were told.
The medical director of Waterford Regional Hospital, Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, told the IHCA conference that at such a time it was clear that a patient needed a warm bed, to be nursed and cared for and to receive proper medical treatment. But this, he said, was now simply an ideal rather than the reality.
Dr Fitzgerald said he had discharged patients who were not fit enough to go home. This was occurring because in the late 1980s the government for fiscal reasons took 20 per cent of hospital beds out of the system. There had been many cutbacks on top of this since then, he said.
"We are at a level where it simply gets worse every winter," he said.
One of the main reasons for the waiting-list problem, he said, was that there were not enough step-down beds to ensure that long-stay patients who were not in need of acute medical care might be discharged from hospital within a medically acceptable time-frame.
"There are people in acute beds costing £3,000 per week that should be in beds costing £300. The capacity of the services is gone so far down that unless there is immediate restoration of shelter for sick and elderly people we will never get out of this situation." he said.
Dr Seamus O'Cathail, consultant radio-therapist at Cork University Hospital, addressed the need for an appropriate increase in health funding. Speaking about consistent under-funding, Dr O'Cathail said there had been no new radio-therapist appointments for 20 years in the State. "No amount of creative accounting can hide the fact that we have had a net contraction of the service every year," he said.
The meeting passed a motion condemning the practice of closing hospital beds, during the summer months and at other times, as a means of controlling costs.