New figures have shown that the hospitals bearing the brunt of the current trolley crisis are in fact the smaller ones nationwide - despite larger hospitals ‘grabbing headlines’.
That’s according to Denis Naughten TD, who carried out an analysis of the hospital trolley numbers compared to the overall number of beds available at each hospital.
The figures show there were just seven beds in Nenagh Hospital for every patient on a trolley on average last month.
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Whereas at the other end of the scale, there were 215 beds in Tullamore Hospital for every patient on a trolley.
“It was therefore 30 times more likely that a patient on a trolley in Tullamore would get a bed than a similar patient in Nenagh Hospital,” the analysis read.
The hospitals and staff under the most pressure due to overcrowding were not the ones with the headline-grabbing numbers, Mr. Naughten pointed out, but rather, it was the saller hospitals in Nenagh, Bantry, Ballinasloe, Kilkenny, and Nass.
Commenting on the figures Mr Naughten said: “If we delve down into the numbers of patients waiting on trolleys to date in 2023 and analyse this as a percentage of the number of beds available in each hospital, we get a much better indication of the pressure that each hospital was under last month”.
He went on to say that this is of huge importance to highlight because “the HSE will put the hospitals with the big numbers at the top of their agenda”, and so, “it is feared that the smaller hospitals under the most pressure will be ignored because this is what has happened up to now”.
Mr Naughten went on to say: “Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, as just one example, put a proposal to the HSE and Department of Health nearly three years ago to provide a modular extension to the Emergency Department to ease the overcrowding.
“To date no decision has been made on this proposal because clearly it is not high enough up the HSE agenda.
“Other hospitals have put forward simple measures to deal with the challenges that they are facing, which would not only ease pressure on our hospital system but ensure that patients get safer and more timely care.”
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