IT is hard to believe that in this day and age almost 750 people were admitted to hospital yesterday without a bed.
Numbers revealed by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organiation on Monday saw 747 patients, including 32 children, on trolleys in hospitals across the country.
Twenty-five of those patients were on trolleys in Mayo University Hospital. While those numbers are some way behind other hospitals in the west – Sligo University Hospital had 54, University Hospital Galway had 53 – it’s still not good enough that in the depth of winter, patients of all ages are lying on trolleys in the emergency department and other wards in MUH.
The INMO have described the trolley figures as ‘truly shocking’. They have correctly said that the numbers should be a wake up call to the Health Service Executive, the Government and individual hospital groups, who must realise that extraordinary steps must be taken to ensure that we do not replicate the record-breaking trolley numbers seen at the beginning of this year.
The INMO believe that the HSE must take action in the form of accelerating the use of private hospital beds, the immediate cancellation of all non-urgent elective activity and the introduction of heightened infection-control measures in all hospitals.
They are now seeking urgent engagement with the CEO of the HSE and the Minister for Health to discuss what measures can be taken to protect the dignity of sick patients and the safety of nurses who are trying to provide care in suboptimal conditions.

Imminent overcrowding
THE INMO have been warning that dangerous levels of overcrowding are imminent, but they believe there is still time to avoid intolerable levels ahead of Christmas and the New Year if action is taken now.
All this comes at a time when record levels of a common respiratory illness that particularly affects babies is putting hospitals under unprecedented pressure. Almost 1,000 cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) were notified to authorities last week, and almost 370 patients, most of them children, were hospitalised. Case numbers and hospitalisations are already almost twice as high as last winter, which was regarded as very severe for RSV.
The Minister for Health and the HSE simply have to put their shoulders to the wheel and put a plan in place to try and make our hospitals safer for the next number of months.
A National Crisis Management Team (NCMT) was set up last December, and it found inconsistencies in how different hospitals implemented plans to deal with overcrowding and improve patient flow.
The NCMT also found emergency department attendances were increasing as patients were finding it difficult to access GPs. Meanwhile, GPs told the NCMT they were aware of patients who refused to attend hospital due to the pressure emergency departments faced.
This simply should not be happening. The time really has come to find long-term solutions to these problems, rather than engaging in firefighting when the inevitable problems manifest themselves during the winter months.