HSE warned of patient risk without delivery of new Mid West hospital
James Cox
The Medical Board of HSE Mid West today issues an "unprecedented recommendation" to Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill.
It stated that risks to patient care at University Hospital Limerick "remain intolerable and unacceptable, despite repeated warnings from frontline clinicians, hospital management, national oversight bodies, and patient advocates".
"We say this is not a newly emerging crisis, but a long-standing and repeatedly documented failure to deliver sufficient acute capacity across the Mid West health system. The doctors and surgeons of the HSE Mid West call for the following actions: 1. Immediate establishment of a fully-empowered HSE Mid West Development Board, with local leadership, clinicians, healthcare staff, and
patient representatives, with full authority to drive delivery of the new hospital project.
"2. Terms of reference guaranteeing a full, all-services acute hospital with a minimum of 400 beds in Phase 1 and long-term expansion capacity of at least 1,000 beds, co-located with the new maternity hospital.
"3. Emergency 2026 funding to address escalating patient safety risks, including urgent recruitment of additional consultants, NCHDs, nurses, health and social care professionals, clerical staff, and technical staff.
"4. Suspension of all HSE staffing ceilings and related restrictions across theMid West until patient safety risks are stabilised and the region reaches parity with other HSE regions. More than seven months after HIQA exposed serious and risks to patient care at Ireland’s busiest and most overcrowded hospital, driven by constrained bed capacity, we say the conditions identified in that report persist daily."
These issues include severe overcrowding, excessive trolley numbers, delayed admissions, "exhausted staff, and an emergency system operating without the acute capacity required to safely meet demand across the region".
Despite "repeated warnings", the HIQA findings, and the Government announcement of a new hospital last year, the region is still awaiting the establishment of the Development Board required to progress delivery of the new acute hospital.
“This crisis did not emerge overnight, and it has not gone unrecognised,” said Colin Peirce, consultant surgeon and chairman of the Medical Board.
“Frontline staff, clinicians, and patient advocates have been warning for years that the Mid West does not have the acute hospital capacity required to provide consistently safe care for a growing and ageing population. Those warnings have been repeatedly escalated over many years. HIQA has confirmed them. Patient and staff continue to experience them every day.
"Our teams are doing everything possible to protect patients in extraordinarily difficult conditions, but mitigation is not safety. Escalation plans are not capacity. Corridor care is not acceptable healthcare. Patients in the Mid West are waiting too long for beds, too long for treatment, too long for dignity and privacy, and too long for the safe care they deserve. The people of the Mid West are being failed by a system that does not have enough acute hospital capacity to safely meet demand.”
