A senior doctor has warned of a health service “Armageddon” this winter due to Covid-19 and the flu.
Dr Fergal Hickey, who is president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine, warned his doomsday scenario will unfold if the HSE does not overcome hospital waiting times.
Dr Hickey, also a consultant in emergency medicine at Sligo University Hospital issued his warning as the Emergency Department Task Force met yesterday to discuss a worst-case winter scenario.
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It’s feared this could see 17,000 people in hospital with Covid-19, 4,500 flu patients and 700 in ICU.
The meeting also detailed 40,398 breaches of waiting times when patients were left waiting over 24 hours this year.
Dr Hickey fears hospital services “could collapse” and urged the annual winter plan to be replaced by a year-round approach.
He said: “If that scenario comes to pass, that will be hell on earth for patients and the clinical staff looking after them . It would be an Armageddon-type situation. We simply don’t have the bed capacity to cope as things stand.
“That has not been addressed after many years of agitation on the issue.
“Our acute bed capacity is 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 of the population.
“The OECD average is 1.3, so we are going into this [winter] with one hand tied behind our back.
“Our emergency departments have been left to become warehouses for admitted inpatients.
“The statistic of patients waiting more than 24 hours for admission is for patients who have had their emergency care in the emergency department and they need to be moved to a hospital ward.
“But because they remain in the emergency department, they completely negate the
emergency department’s capacity to act as an emergency department.
“We can’t deal with the next group of incoming patients.
“That’s the current situation.
“One day last week, the INMO said there were 596 patients on trolleys, so that shows we simply can’t cope currently.
“We could have no hope of coping this winter.” Dr Hickey claimed the health service is short by a “few thousand beds” and dismissed the seasonal winter plan.
He said: “The idea of a winter initiative is completely stupid. This is a 12-month problem, a 365-day-of-the-year problem.
“But the only time that there seems to be either political interest in this or health service management interest in this is the winter.
“We’re doing this too late. Without solving the underlying problem, which is our acute bed capacity shortage, and critical care shortage, we simply won’t have the critical care beds to accommodate the number of additional cases.
“There will still be people having strokes, heart attacks, road collisions, and needing surgery.”
Dr Hickey also warned that the cost of living crisis threatens to make the hospital bed shortage “substantially worse”.
He told RTE presenter Claire Byrne: “I do genuinely worry about this winter.
“We have no idea how the two illnesses [Covid and flu] will co-exist and the negative impact of how one may negatively impact on the other.”
He warned that the health service could be “unsalvageable” and that the “only way is down” unless the “core issues” of acute bed capacity, staff exits, and 900 consultancy vacancies are resolved.
Meanwhile, there were 485 people waiting on trolleys for a hospital bed yesterday, according to the INMO.
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