{"id":111165,"date":"2025-10-29T23:13:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T23:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/111165\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T23:13:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T23:13:14","slug":"government-must-declare-capacity-emergency-at-uhl-hospitals-medical-board-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/111165\/","title":{"rendered":"Government must declare ‘capacity emergency’ at UHL, hospital’s medical board warns"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Government needs to \u201curgently change\u201d its approach to hospital overcrowding in Limerick, and a “capacity emergency” needs to be declared as patients continue to face \u201creduced privacy and dignity\u201d compared to elsewhere, doctors have warned.<\/p>\n

The call from doctors on the University Hospital Limerick medical board follows findings in Hiqa\u2019s review<\/a> of emergency services in the region, published last month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be helpful for Limerick to be regarded as a capacity emergency,\u201d Dr Joe Devlin, deputy chairman of the medical board, said today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is really what this Hiqa report says \u2014 there\u2019s a lack of capacity. It\u2019s unequal, and very different to every other part of the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Hiqa stated baldly this is posing a risk to patient safety, so if you don\u2019t regard that as an emergency, I don\u2019t know what is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has pledged to respond to three solutions proposed by Hiqa by Christmas, and to look at bed shortages in the interim.<\/p>\n

Dr Devlin said it was clear during the pandemic that construction could happen quickly in health if necessary. He called for a similar approach for the Mid-West.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should the children in the Mid-West have less access to emergency healthcare than the children in the North-West, or the South-West, or in Dublin?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The medical board said that the Hiqa review is the third investigation or review to find overcrowding to be a real problem since the death of Aoife Johnston<\/a> in 2022, but that little has changed.<\/p>\n

\"AoifeAoife Johnston, aged 16, died on December 19, 2022, from meningitis-related sepsis after waiting for treatment in the emergency department of UHL.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hope to no longer hear the HSE or the Department of Health blame staff in HSE Midwest for problems that have yet again been clearly identified as those of physical bed capacity,\u201d the board stated.<\/p>\n

It highlighted \u201cthe privacy and dignity deficiencies our patients experience\u201d, and stressed that Hiqa found staff still deliver more care than in other hospitals despite having fewer beds and working “in an inappropriately overcrowded environment”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dr Devlin pointed out while hospitals such as Cork University Hospital have ready support from smaller hospitals locally at Model 3 level, UHL does not.<\/p>\n

The board stated: \u201cThe direction from Government on this critical point needs to urgently change.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Government needs to \u201curgently change\u201d its approach to hospital overcrowding in Limerick, and a “capacity emergency” needs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[67442,21911,103,397,396,61,60,21912],"class_list":{"0":"post-111165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-aoife-johnston","9":"tag-hospital-overcrowding","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-health-care","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-place-limerick"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}