Nursing union raises safety issues at Limerick Hospital

Overcrowding at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital, Limerick is placing a huge strain on the provision of safe clinical care, a nursing union has warned.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has claimed the hospital has in excess of 51 patients who are either on a hospital trolley in the emergency department or on a ward, or are placed on extra beds on a corridor on Tuesday.
Members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation have reported that over the Christmas period in-patients at the hospital had little access to diagnostic tests and procedures.
This has led to very few in-patient discharges and the consequent inability of the hospital to cope with the surge in activity since December 26, 2010.
The INMO has again requested the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) to undertake an urgent review of the impact of the centralisation of all acute services into the MWRH Limerick without the required additional beds and processes to respond to the increased demands in activity.
The INMO members are now also demanding that all further plans to centralise services from February 2011 i.e. cardiology and acute medicine are suspended pending the outcome of this review.
INMO Industrial Relations Officer, Mary Fogarty said, “Our members are repeatedly raising with us their concerns around the clinical safety of patients in such a chaotic and unresponsive environment. It is unacceptable that a regional centre of excellence shuts down over the Christmas period and is consequently unable to respond to a surge in demand in a safe and coordinated way.”
Dr Anthony Dempsey, clinical director at the MWRH stated on a radio programme that the surge in admissions was a national one and the Mid-West wasn’t different from any other areas in the country.
“We’ve had a tremendous surge in the presentation to the Emergency Department over the last few days, over the both bank holiday weekends and I think there has been you know as well as a high presentation of flu like problems there has been the re-emergence of the swine flu. 
“We in fact have five patients at the moment, four of them being ventilated in the hospital requiring isolation.  What we’ve done, yesterday we had a fairly senior meeting with our senior emergency consultants, senior nursing management as well as the ICU nurses and what we’ve done is we have an extra 15 beds in the system compared to this time last year. 
“We curtailed all elective work today so all surgery has stopped.  We’ve cancelled the surgical day cases opening up our surgical day ward as an extra ward to accommodate the overflow of patients and we’ve also tried to isolate the swine flu cases which has been quite difficult so we have, we have put you know things into, into the situation to hopefully reduce the problem over the next few days.  It’s likely this will go on for a few days.
He said that surgical services have been reconfigured to the point where all major cases are completed in the regional hospital with more day case surgery being completed in Ennis and Nenagh Hospitals.