Acute hospitals: The Health Service Executive (HSE) is to carry out another review of bed capacity in acute hospitals across the State.
John O'Brien, the acting director of the HSE's National Hospital's Office, has been charged with conducting the review "as a matter of priority".
Doctors' representative organisations yesterday claimed the need for extra beds in the Republic's acute hospitals and the number of beds required had already been clearly identified.
A national review of bed capacity, published by the Department of Health in January 2002, said more than 4,000 extra acute hospital beds would be needed within the following 10 years. And the previous November the Government agreed following the publication of the National Health Strategy to provide 3,000 extra beds by 2011.
Finbarr Fitzpatrick, secretary general of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association, said the vast majority of these promised beds had yet to be delivered on.
"We see little point in studying the problem yet again. It's this thing of yet another report to avoid action and decision making," he said. "There was an exhaustive bed stock review undertaken by the Department of Health in 2001.
"The need is for extra beds to meet today's demands and also to meet the needs of the one million increase in population that will take place over the next 15-20 years," he added.
Dr Asam Ishtiaq, president of the Irish Medical Organisation, said the move was an attempt to reinvent the wheel while people were waiting on trolleys in A&E departments and while elective surgery continued to be cancelled on a regular basis due to a beds shortage.
"Another review is not going to resolve the current problems. It's just window dressing," he said.
He added that if the HSE insisted on a review, it should be done by independent consultants rather than the HSE itself - in the interests of transparency.
This is because the chief executive of the HSE, Prof Brendan Drumm, has already expressed the view that the State is "massively equipped with hospital beds". He told a nurses conference last October that the Republic was over-equipped with hospital beds by international standards and the focus needed to be on treating people in the community rather than in hospital beds.
More recently, Minister for Health Mary Harney told the Dáil that increasing the number of hospital beds would not solve the A&E problem without more effective use of existing beds.
Dr Ishtiaq said it seemed Prof Drumm and Ms Harney were the only two people in the country who questioned the need for extra beds.
However, the Irish Nurses Organisation's general secretary, Liam Doran, said if there were question marks in the minds of people, not least Prof Drumm, about the numbers of beds now required to meet the needs of a growing population, then the least that should be done is a review of the existing situation.
"We are confident that it will throw up, with the growth in population, that the original review underestimates our bed capacity requirements for the future," he said. It would be important that the findings of any fresh review were implemented, not like the last one, he said, and that the numbers of beds required in different hospitals were identified.
Angela Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the HSE's new A&E taskforce, said the feeling in the HSE was that the subject of bed capacity needed to be revisited at this time as the population was growing and plans to improve primary care services had to be taken into account.