Almost 500 people were waiting for a bed in hospitals across the country on Monday morning, as hospital staff prepare for another week of overcrowding.
Figures from the Irish Nursing and Midwives Organisation (INMO) trolley watch show that 489 admitted patients were waiting for beds on Monday morning. Almost 400 of those patients were waiting in the emergency department, while 99 were in wards elsewhere in the hospital.
The hospitals worst affected include University Hospital Limerick (UHL) with 48 patients waiting, Cork University Hospital with 38 and Letterkenny University Hospital with 37 patients.
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More consultants and senior decision-makers were deployed in hospitals over the weekend to ensure a more consistent flow of discharges across Saturday and Sunday.
More than 400 patients were discharged on Saturday, compared with 278 the previous Saturday, figures show.
However, some 537 patients who were well enough to leave hospital were delayed.
Last week, Ireland recorded its highest ever number of patients waiting for a hospital bed on a single day at 931. The number has decreased in the days since as the Department of Health and the Health Service Executive (HSE) moved to address the overcrowding issues.
Senior staff were asked to attend work over the weekend to try to address patient safety concerns. The chief clinical officer of the HSE Dr Colm Henry said there has been some relief in the number of people waiting on a hospital bed since last Tuesday. He said however, that the current figure remains "too high".
"It is clear that from the extraordinary efforts of our staff, who heeded our call to address the patients' safety issue clearly associated with long stays in our emergency departments, turning up this weekend and working really hard after a difficult Christmas to try to clear those logjams in the hospitals and ensure a better flow of patients into and out of hospital," he told RTE's Morning Ireland programme.
"There was a whole of system response and we had more senior decision-makers in than we normally do.
"We brought in senior decision-makers but also the support network around them to ensure that when they make decisions in identifying the right patients who could go home, that the right diagnostics were there, the right managers were there and the right community services were there.
"We asked for extra effort from staff who are already exhausted so we could address clear issues for patient safety.
"These extra efforts from staff were not in response to criticism, they were in response to address the patient safety concerns for patients who had presented to emergency departments."
He said that the HSE is working with the Private Hospitals Association (PHA) to secure additional beds.
Of the 188 private beds secured by the HSE, 148 patients are already in those beds.
Asked how many more beds are needed from private hospitals, Dr Henry said: "We are seeking additional beds in case this surge in viruses, which has not yet peaked, continues to cause impact on our healthcare system.
"We are looking for as much as we can get. Each individual hospital has been given funding to link with our local private hospitals to maximise the number of beds."
On Monday, UHL started a pilot project to help the pressure on its emergency department.
The project will see doctors and paramedics at Ennis Hospital assessing patients to establish whether or not they need to go to the Limerick hospital.
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