Brendan Howlin rules out extra funds to ease A&E

Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin will not provide emergency funding to the Department of Health to combat hospital overcrowding.

He said there had been no contact from Minister for Health Leo Varadkar in relation to additional funds to deal with the problem.

“We’ve had long discussions about the health budget for 2015,” he told journalists in Dublin. “It is [about] more than resources obviously. There are resource constraints affecting every department.

“It’s not a matter of funding. In terms of the pressure on the acute A&Es – and it’s happening in Britain as well – the numbers presenting at A&Es are 50 per cent up. It’s very hard to plan for that level of increase, although it is a seasonal increase.”

Before the last budget the Health Service Executive sought €106.5 million to free up hospital beds and reduce overcrowding through a plan that involved discharging hundreds of elderly patients to step-down facilities such as nursing homes.

Mr Howlin said €25 million had been provided but that it was not simple. “It’s not a matter of finding a bed anywhere. People want to be discharged to their own localities and physically finding suitable beds, or getting home-care packages together in the community, is something that can’t be instantly provided but it is being worked on,” he said.

Minister for Children James Reilly said Mr Varadkar, his successor in the Department of Health, had a "very difficult job to do" and he was "fully supportive of his efforts to address the needs of people who find themselves in need of medical attention".

Dr Reilly previously promised that “never again” would the number of people waiting on hospital trolleys exceed the then record of 569 but on Tuesday it rose to 601.

Asked why this had happened, Dr Reilly said he was no longer the minister for health so “I can’t answer that question”.

“We do know that we have increasing numbers attending our emergency departments: we’ve an increase in population and our population is ageing. All those factors influence what is happening in our emergency departments.”

He said it was “a sector-wide issue” and that while the “pinch point may be emergency departments”, it was a reflection of the entire system across areas such as primary and community care.

Tánaiste Joan Burton said the key to reducing pressure on A&E units was to provide a greater range of step-down facilities, home-care packages and for people to be released as early as possible.

“That’s what the Government wants to see in the healthcare system,” she said.

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said the overcrowding in hospitals represented "an appalling situation" that the Government had been warned about long before it reached the levels seen this week.

“The Minister himself has now acknowledged that he knew before Christmas this was going to happen and that the measures he took were not adequate,” he said. “I think the Minister needs to stop being a commentator and some sort of detached analyst. He is responsible as he is the Minister for Health and he needs to move with a far greater degree of urgency.”

Asked if he was being a hypocrite given people were on trolleys when his party was in government and while he was minister for health, Mr Martin replied that Fianna Fáil had taken action when such issues occurred.

“The [current] Programme for Government said they would provide more money to the elderly for home-care packages, provide more nursing-home beds and more funding. They have actually gone in the opposite direction.”