CONSULTANTS AT a Galway hospital have warned the Minister for Health that the retirement of 30 per cent of nurses from the hospital’s orthopaedic department will mean half the beds will have to close and waiting lists for surgery will grow by 300 per cent.
The four orthopaedic consultants at Merlin Park Hospital – doctors Stephen Kearns, Fintan Shannon, Bill Curtin and Michael O’Sullivan – have also raised concerns about patient safety and said outpatient waiting lists, which stand at 7,000, will grow.
The orthopaedic ward at the hospital, which is part of the Galway University Hospitals group, has 25 beds and should have 21 nurses.
It has already lost some nurses to retirement and currently operates with 16, but by the end of February it will only have 11, doctors have said.
The theatre, with two operating rooms, should have 8.5 nurses. It currently operates with seven, and by the end of February it will be down to 4.5 nurses.
Retiring staff will not be replaced due to the Health Service Executive (HSE) moratorium on recruitment.
Doctors have said the shortages will mean half the beds in the orthopaedic ward will have to close and elective surgery will be halved, as 4.5 nurses cannot manage two operating rooms.
Minister for Health James Reilly met the consultants at the hospital on Friday.
Dr Curtin told The Irish Times they were not scaremongering, but were seriously worried. If the nurses were not replaced, he would only be able to tackle his elective surgery list every fortnight instead of every week, he said, and he would be working at far less than his capacity.
“At the moment I go to the admissions office and say I can do ‘x’ number of operations on Monday and I’m told, ‘No, we do not have the beds’. Now I will be told we do not have the beds or the nurses,” he said.
He said they had tried to tackle the beds issue by cutting down on the length of time people stay in hospital and by bringing them in on the morning of an operation instead of the night before.
“But our bedrock will be the nursing issue,” he said.
“I can’t do a hip replacement by myself.”
He also said outpatient numbers would grow because it would not make sense to keep on seeing patients, knowing capacity had halved.
“Our wish is that we will get supported on this and staff will be replaced to let us do our work,” he said.
“Our worries have been heard at the very top; it’s out of our hands.”
A spokesman for the Minister said the recently appointed chief executive of the Galway group of hospitals, Bill Maher, was reviewing a range of issues including “difficulties related to staffing for orthopaedics”.
The spokesman said Mr Reilly, who had a meeting with Mr Maher last Friday, looked forward to his assessment of the needs of the hospital group.
He added that, while the moratorium would not be lifted, the Minister had “the backing of Government on the issue of certain flexibilities, depending on the scale of need”.
