Families of patients who spent the weekend on trolleys in the accident and emergency unit of Dublin's Mater Hospital vented their frustration yesterday evening by staging a protest outside the hospital's main gates.
There were about 20 patients on trolleys in the hospital's A&E unit yesterday, at least one of whom was waiting for a bed since Thursday, according to the protesters.
One of those who has been on a trolley since Saturday morning is 72-year-old Ms Kathleen Byrne from Glasnevin, Dublin. Her husband and family were among those carrying placards outside the hospital.
They were also collecting signatures for a petition they hope to present to the new Minister for Health, Ms Harney, in the hope that she will do something to solve the ongoing problem of A&E overcrowding.
The Minister has pledged it will be one of her priorities while at the Department of Health. Last week she held her first in a series of meetings with the chief executives of the main Dublin hospitals to try to find solutions to the problem.
Ms Byrne's husband, Mr Brendan Byrne, said his wife's head was spinning when she woke on Saturday. He called a doctor and was told he would have to wait three to four hours for a house call. He decided to call an ambulance. It was thought his wife had suffered a series of strokes.
He explained she had a bad back but had been lying on a trolley for over 30 hours. "It's aggravating the whole thing," he said.
Furthermore, he said, a lot of money was being squandered which should be put into the health service. "You see ridiculous things like the Spire on O'Connell Street and all these tribunals. These things to me are squandering taxpayers' money."
His daughter, Ms Janette Byrne, who went to the High Court three years ago to compel the hospital to provide her with a bed so she could be treated for cancer, said there was blood on the floor around her mother's trolley. "They are treating human beings like animals," she said.
Ms Antoinette Doyle, whose 84-year-old mother, Mrs Mary Mulreavy, has been on a trolley since lunchtime on Friday, said her mother worked all her life and was now even paying tax on her pension, yet the one time she was seeking assistance from the State she couldn't get it.
"Last night there was one man lying across three hard chairs in A&E and he was on a drip which was hanging on a nail on the wall. You wouldn't see it anywhere," she said.
A spokesman for the Mater said the hospital had ongoing problems around bed capacity and had recently campaigned for 100 more beds.
There were 77 people occupying acute beds in the hospital who were fit for discharge to long-term care settings, but there were no such facilities for them, he said.