The Government is to provide hundreds of additional beds and develop a new facility close to University Hospital Limerick (UHL) as part of a new initiative to tackle chronic overcrowding in the region, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has announced.
She said there would be an expansion of acute bed capacity at UHL at Dooradoyle while a second site nearby would also be developed.
The Minister said the Government on Tuesday had given approval to progress a blend of options put forward by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) aimed at dealing with challenges faced by hospital services in the midwest region.
The Minister said that Hiqa had found that “the key problem is that there are not enough inpatient beds in the midwest to meet demand”.
RM Block
The emergency department at University Hospital Limerick has experienced serious overcrowding for years as patients deemed necessary to be admitted queued for access to a bed.
The Minister said Hiqa had put forward three proposals for dealing with the challenges faced in the midwest and she intended to progress all of these.
The health watchdog offered three options: expand capacity at UHL; build an elective hospital nearby to UHL; and build a new hospital in the region with an emergency department.
Ms Carroll MacNeill said while additional beds would be provided at University Hospital Limerick, some services currently located there could be moved to another location.
In a statement on Tuesday, Ms Carroll MacNeill said her intention is to advance all three options, adding that she is aware of the “deep concern” of those in the midwest about the healthcare available to them.
[ Health Minister not ruling out extra hospital to solve HSE Mid West overcrowdingOpens in new window ]
“Since I received the report, I have fully accepted the need to expand acute capacity at UHL and the wider midwest region. Like everyone else in Ireland, the people of the midwest region deserve access to high-quality and timely acute hospital care when they need it most. The implementation of the Hiqa advice, progressing all three options, represents an opportunity to provide quality care across all services in the region so that people of the region can have the confidence they need to know that healthcare services are meeting the current and future needs,” she said.
She told RTÉ’s News at One that plans were under way to develop a new surgical hub which could see about 10,000 procedures carried out in a new facility to be established away from University Hospital Limerick.
The Minister said current plans would deliver about 306 beds at University Hospital Limerick to progress the first option put forward by Hiqa.
She said when expansion plans at other, smaller hospitals in the region were taken into account, by 2031 there would be 420 additional beds in the midwest than there were in 2024.
The Department of Health said that to progress option B, the Minister would mandate the HSE to secure an available appropriate adjacent site, progressed through HSE governance structures in the usual way; establish a project board; and further explore the opportunities for decanting services away from the main Dooradoyle campus.
“Consideration will also be required for what services can be relocated or decanted to Ennis, Saint John’s and Nenagh to decongest the Dooradoyle site,” it said.
The Department of Health also said that “operational delivery will also be dependent on recruitment of necessary workforce to bring this new capacity into service”.
The Minister said that to deliver the third option of a new hospital in the region, the Department of Health would develop a plan for the incremental strategy of organising services and investment in healthcare services in the midwest.
“The midwest needs another hospital facility at scale, and that we will be examining as we move ahead with the purchase of a new site, looking at all of the flexibility as to how we might deliver option C,” said Ms MacNeill.
In mid-2024, then minister for health Stephen Donnelly asked Hiqa to review the delivery of urgent and emergency healthcare services in HSE Mid West, which covers Limerick, Clare and North Tipperary.
The request, which was made on foot of patient safety concerns, also considered the need for a second emergency department (ED) in the region.
Hiqa put forward three possible options.
The first option was to expand capacity at UHL’s Dooradoyle site. The second was the extension of the UHL campus to include a second site nearby and the third option was the development of a new hospital in HSE Mid West, providing a second emergency department.
The Minister said on Tuesday she has decided to proceed with all three options.
“It is my intention to progress all three options together and immediately with option A and option B and to discuss how best to progress option C, recognising that is much more of a medium-term solution.
“I am fully aware of the pain and the concern that people of the midwest have had in relation to the available healthcare services to them,” the Minister said. “I want to assure them that as we look at, as we progress all three options, our absolute priority will be continuing to deliver inpatient acute beds on the Dooradoyle site because we can see what a difference that is making.
“There has been a huge impact from the 96 beds that we opened in October, with essentially a halving of the number of people on trolleys in the six weeks before and six weeks after that,” she said. “So we know that works and we know that’s what people need in the immediate term.”
