Serious overcrowding in the accident and emergency unit of Dublin's Mater Hospital has forced the hospital to reopen some of the beds it closed in recent weeks.
The hospital reopened its day ward last week after the situation became so severe that one patient was about to spend his fifth day on a trolley.
The unit was so overcrowded even the resuscitation area was taken up with patients waiting for beds, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed yesterday.
The day ward, which has 18 beds, closed again on Friday but when pressure mounted on A&E over the weekend, six of the beds in the day ward were reopened once more. The spokeswoman said the hospital had to cancel 110 elective admissions and 33 day case admissions last week.
Part of the pressure on A&E, she said, was that some patients whose procedures were cancelled were turning up very ill in the unit.
"Last week was particularly bad in A&E. We had anything up to 30 patients waiting for beds and we only have 18 trolleys. Sometimes patients have had to get off trolleys to let more seriously ill patients onto them.
"We had got to a stage where we did not have a resuscitation area because it was used up. Every trolley was used up including the resuscitation ones," the spokeswoman said.
When the hospital's A&E unit becomes inundated with cases it would usually "ask for protection" from another hospital and divert new cases to the other hospital.
However, last week most of the time it looked to Beaumont Hospital for protection, Beaumont was unable to provide it because of the pressure it found itself under, she said.
She added, however, that the hospital intended to close the reopened beds again as soon as possible as it was "unfortunately the only way we can save money".
There were 14 patients awaiting beds in the Mater's A&E unit yesterday morning, and a further 90 patients were occupying acute beds in the hospital even though they were fit for discharge but there was nowhere to discharge them to.