The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, is to meet the medical staff from St Luke's Hospital, Kilkenny, and local representatives in the area following concerns about healthcare at the hospital.
An internal audit of admissions in January to St Luke's, which serves counties Kilkenny and Carlow, showed 81 patients were put in corridors. The average length of stay on the corridors was 18 hours, with one person kept in a corridor for three days. There have also been reports of women miscarrying on corridors.
A Fianna Fail TD, Mr John McGuinness, raised the issue in the Dail and asked the Minister to meet those involved in the hospital to assess the situation. Following this, medical staff at St Luke's called for a meeting with local representatives and outlined the problems they faced and possible solutions, according to Dr Garry Courtney, chairman of the hospital's medical board.
The South Eastern Health Board has said plans for St Luke's over the years have never been implemented because funding was not provided.
Mr John Magner, regional manager of the South Eastern Health Board, said matters in St Luke's were set to improve in the coming years because a £35 million development project which would provide 90 beds had just begun.
Building work under way at a cost of £6.5 million includes a 45-bed acute psychiatry unit, a six-bed coronary care unit and a CAT-scan building.
A further £4.6 million will in the future go to providing extra beds, the refurbishment of the obstetrics department and the provision of a special-care baby unit and additional beds in Carlow District Hospital.
More than £10 million has been earmarked in the National Development Plan for a new accident and emergency department in Kilkenny.
While the number of people in corridors in January was unusually high, the problem did not go away during the rest of the year, Mr Magner said. "For the majority of times we have more medical admissions than we have medical beds," he said.
The health board has also written to GPs in Tipperary, Laois and Wicklow operating outside the South Eastern Health Board asking them to stop referring patients to St Luke's because of bed shortages.
Additional facilities would be built for care of the elderly and mentally ill in Carlow but there would be no accident and emergency department set up in the county, Mr Magner said. "An A&E department has to be comprehensive. There must be access to radiology and laboratories," he said.
Mr Magner added that the 25 miles people in Carlow had to travel to A&E in Kilkenny was not significant.
But with the population growing rapidly in Carlow, Mr Gerry Dunne of Carlow Chamber of Commerce said the county needed a day unit which could carry out minor operations. "Carlow is growing at the same rate as Dublin - over 5 per cent. If you're attracting people down to an area they are looking at the quality of life . . . we lack in Carlow basic hospital services," he said.
In response to the health board's plan for St Luke's, Mr McGuinness and Senator Jim Gibbons said the board was only "playing catch-up" and the plan, while radical when it came out in 1997, would not fully meet the needs of the region. "The health board is heavily bureaucratic and needs to be overhauled . . . there is no speed in anything it does," Mr McGuinness said.
Mr Magner said the £35 million development was not the end to the upgrading of services in Carlow and Kilkenny. "Every healthcare plan has to evolve and we won't be stopping looking at the needs of Carlow and Kilkenny," he said.
Dr Courtney said the plan for St Luke's meant there was light at the end of the tunnel. "We have the money and the ideas but what we don't have are the people who can convert the money into buildings: the builders, the designers, the architects," he said.
Cllr Tom Maher of Fine Gael, a member of the South Eastern Health Board, said the board had been starved of money over the years and though it had developed plans for the area it did not get the funds. "Between 1987 and 1997 there were promises but no money . . . You just can't pull beds out of the sky," he said.