A crisis is facing Irish hospitals. And it is particularly acute in Dublin. The threat to patient and health care is directly linked to a shortage of hospital beds and to a lack of funding to keep existing facilities open.
Beaumont and the Mater hospitals experienced dreadful overcrowding at their accident and emergency facilities on the north side of Dublin over the weekend. At one point, almost 60 patients who required urgent medical attention were being accommodated on hospital trolleys and chairs at Beaumont. Both hospitals were forced to seek protective cover from other institutions in an attempt to reduce congestion. And, yesterday, Beaumont cancelled all elective surgery.
Last month, with considerable fanfare, the Coalition Government unveiled its plans to restructure and reform the health services. The plans were designed to provide greater value for money, to reduce bureaucracy and to provide greater consistency in the provision of hospital and community care.
Those reforms will take four or five years to implement and, when in place, they should provide a much-improved health system. In the meantime, however, the Government appears determined to force hospitals to operate within their present, inadequate, budgets. And the consequences are there for all to see. There simply are not enough hospital beds to cope with the demands of a growing population. Ireland has the lowest number of hospital beds per capita within the European Union. The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, recognised this last year when he spoke of providing accommodation for an additional 3,000 patients. During the past few months, however, Beaumont and the Mater Hospital were amongst those hospitals closing wards in an attempt to save money and keep within their budgets.
Hospital overcrowding has been exacerbated by a lack of step-down nursing home care and of readily-accessible, home-help assistance within the community. As a consequence, an estimated 350 elderly patients take up vital, and expensive, beds in Beaumont and the Mater when they could be cared for elsewhere. In that regard, reducing the State subvention for nursing home care would make the situation worse. An analysis of admissions to hospitals in the Eastern Health Board Area has shown that a growing percentage of patients access their services through accident and emergency, following lengthy delays as out-patients.
This is an appalling situation. People who would otherwise benefit from elective surgery or other hospital treatments are kept waiting for so long that they fall critically ill. And, when they are finally admitted as emergency cases, they may die on hospital trolleys. The electorate has lost confidence in the Government's handling of our two-tier health care system. It has watched public expenditure rise from €3.6 to €9 billion during the past six years without any dramatic increase in hospital capacity. More beds are urgently required.