The daughter of a 75-year-old woman who has been on a trolley in the corridor of a Dublin hospital for the past four days has sharply criticised the state of the health service.
Ms Sandra Mullen from Tallaght said it was "scandalous" that her sick mother, after working all her life and rearing 11 children, now had to endure being left on a trolley at Tallaght Hospital since Monday.
She said her mother suffered from a heart condition and high blood pressure and collapsed at home on Monday evening. She was rushed by ambulance to Tallaght Hospital at about 5.30 p.m. and since then had been on a trolley waiting for a bed.
"She has a lot of health problems and has been in and out of hospital for the last year, but I've never seen the hospital like this," Ms Mullen said.
Furthermore, she said, her mother wouldn't complain because staff were working under great strain, but she felt the plight of elderly people being treated in this manner by the healthcare system needed to be highlighted.
"I asked this morning when she could expect to get a bed and they didn't know.
"When I asked could we pay for a private bed I was told there was none available, that there were at least 10 people waiting for private beds," she added.
A spokeswoman for the hospital admitted yesterday that there were more than 30 patients on trolleys awaiting beds. She said the hospital was, like many others, experiencing overcrowding in its accident and emergency department.
She stressed that the hospital had no beds closed and did not have patients with the winter vomiting bug.
A&E overcrowding and its affect on patients is constantly being highlighted by the Irish Nurses' Organisation.
Its general secretary, Mr Liam Doran, said Ms Mullan's mother's plight was not in any way unusual.
Management teams, he added, remained far too blasé about the problem. "It is not getting the consistent level of attention this crisis warrants," he said.
"If we were to trawl the major Dublin hospitals any day we would have no difficulty finding up to 100 patients on trolleys," he added.