Irish hospitals are battling against a "perfect storm" of high Covid-19 cases, staff absences, and busy emergency departments.
That's according to HSE chief Paul Reid, who added that emergency departments are setting new records of patient intakes weekly.
It comes following criticism from the World Health Organisation that Ireland lifted its Covid-19 restrictions too quickly.
Read more: Covid-19 Ireland: 21,098 new cases confirmed as hospitalisations near 1,400
Mr Reid said that the Irish government and the HSE were following advice given to them at the time when most restrictions were lifted at the end of February.
He told Newstalk: "We were in a situation certainly where the advice to government from NPHET and the CMO was that the time was right to lift all of the relevant restrictions.
"I think at that time the conditions were right and that was the advice government got from a hospital perspective and a HSE perspective, we weren't arguing against it at that time.
"But as we know with Covid once you get around one corner something else faces you not too far down the road, and that's exactly what we're experiencing right now."
According to Mr Reid, there are several concerns in hospital settings currently at the moment.
He said: “The first thing is the high levels of transmission we are seeing in the community are having a very significant impact on hospitalisations.
“The second point is, we are seeing record levels of emergency department attendances now that we have never seen before week-on-week.
“The third one is, of those emergency department attendances, a significant proportion are older persons who are attending and that leads to higher admissions levels – about 50%."
Meanwhile, Mr Reid said that there is now Covid in nursing homes which is also impacting discharges from hospital.
He said: "Like every industry in every sector, we are seeing a significant growth in staff absences through Covid-positive cases among staff.
“It's a whole kind of perfect storm of issues impacting on us in our health system.”
Read more: Covid-19 Ireland: New BA.2 strain 'impossible to avoid', says Luke O'Neill
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