Tag Archives: Irish Patients Association

A SITE visit of University Hospital Limerick (UHL) found permissive boarding with beds placed “anytime, anywhere, even and including mixed gender” five months before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new unpublished report has revealed. Serious questions about the model of care being adopted in UHL were highlighted in a draft report – “Review of Unscheduled Care Performance” concerning nine public hospitals, which has been released by the Irish Patients’ Association. Chaired by Prof Tom Keane, former President of the RCSI and joint National Lead Clinical Programme in Surgery, the review team, included external clinical and management expertise from NHS Scotland, the Scottish Government and NHS England. They visited nine public acute hospitals including UHL and Galway University Hospitals from August 16, 2019 to November 18, 2019. Overcrowding continues to be a problem in UHL, with 95 patients on trolleys in the hospital on Wednesday, April 6, which once again was the highest in the country. UHL had 36 …

EMERGENCY measures, to manage overcrowding, has been used at the region’s main hospital, on average, every second day of the year to the end of September. The situation has been compared, by a member of the HSE West forum, to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Figures, obtained by the Irish Patients’ Association, show that the Full Capacity Protocol was deployed at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) on 184 days. The protocol involves putting extra beds on wards and in corridors, and only the acute facility in Waterford invoked this so called ‘last resort’ more often. Councillor Cillian Murphy described the protocol as “a nice fancy name for overcrowding”. “When I hear of a solution being described as ‘low cost, high impact’, my cynicism button lights up,” he said. “When something is low cost, it is rarely high impact in a positive way. We need to get to the root of the problem and, in my view, that means getting more …

The Patients First Campaign is holding a public meeting at 7pm on this Tuesday in the South Court Hotel in Limerick to outline a variety of concerns ahead of Budget 2015. Patients First is the umbrella group for a number of organisations, including the Irish Patients Association, Cystic Fibrosis Ireland, Patient Opinion, Irish Medical Organisation and Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation. Public representatives have been invited to this meeting, which will be attended by people from all over the Mid-West. This will allow them hear, first hand, from past patients, their families, together with the partner organisations in the campaign, what their experience of the health service is and what we expect, from the political system, with regard to developing and protecting our public health service over the next five years. The core goals of the campaign are: 1. Budget must protect health service and patient care. 2. Independent, transparent, free, easily accessible, feedback mechanism that provides all patients, carers …