The Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has expressed her “deep concern” to the HSE about urgent and emergency care at hospitals in the west and north west, as well as at St Vincent’s in Dublin.
In one letter, sent in mid September, Ms MacNeill said there were persistently high numbers of patients on trolleys in August – a summer month when the health system is usually less busy – in hospitals in the HSE’s West/North West region, which includes Galway, Mayo, Sligo and Letterkenny.
The Minister is understood to have warned in her letter to HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster that there would be “a heightened risk to patients if underlying challenges were not tackled in a timely and effective manner”.
It is understood she maintained it is essential that there is a sustained focus on actions to stabilise the situation in the region.
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Separately, she wrote to the HSE about the situation at St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin. It is understood she maintained that there was a higher-than-expected number of patients on trolleys for 13 of the 31 days in August.
Ms Carroll MacNeill is understood to have said that the steady trend of high trolley numbers and low weekend discharges of patients were “a cause for concern”.
Sources said Mr Gloster subsequently deployed additional support for the West and North West region as part of a plan to improve the situation there.
The Minister told the Oireachtas’s health committee on Wednesday that she will shortly be writing a similar letter to the HSE regarding urgent and emergency care in hospitals in the south and southwest: Cork University Hospital, the Mercy University Hospital and Kerry University Hospital.
Ms Carroll MacNeill said that in all these cases there were no explanatory factors either regionally or demographically for why trolley numbers were so much worse at weekends.
The Minister praised University Hospital Limerick which, she said, despite all its challenges had the best weekend patient discharge rates. She said all consultants at the hospital, irrespective of which type of State contract they were working under, were working extended hours to meet an increased demand.
“The cardiology, renal, emergency medicine and surgery consultants are all working on site at the weekend.”
She said this was an example of a hospital being run well, but she “cannot say the same thing” about other hospitals.
“Limerick discharged 37 people on Sunday this weekend and Kerry discharged six.”
The Minister said Letterkenny University Hospital was one of the centres with persistent difficulties with the flow of patients from admission to discharge.
She said there were 71 patients discharged from the hospital last Friday, 10 on Saturday and six on Sunday.
“It is not right and it is not fair that you can have a different hospital experience depending on the day of the week or the county you live in. That is wrong.”
“If I achieve nothing else as Minister for Health other than achieving consistency in good patient flow across hospitals that did not result in the patient safety episodes that we are seeing, that would be fine by me.”
