Galway Clinic: A new A&E service at the private Galway Clinic could prevent patients from having to wait up to 12 hours on a trolley in the public sector.
The FastER Care service, which is consultant-led and delivered, will be run on a three-month pilot basis with patients accepted by GP referral only.
Medical director at the Galway Clinic, Dr Olywn McWeeney, said they hoped at the end of the three-month pilot programme to open the service up to patients who wish to self-refer, ie to just walk in without going to see a GP first.
An A&E clinic will be held at the hospital from 12pm to 8pm, Monday to Friday dealing with conditions such as acute trauma, sports injuries, soft tissue infections, sub acute headaches and low to intermediate risk chest pain.
There is no waiting list at the A&E Clinic and, after initial assessment by a nurse, patients are seen and examined by a consultant in emergency medicine.
A management plan is then formulated and any investigations deemed necessary, such as blood tests, X-rays, CT or MRI scans or ultrasound, carried out without delay.
All FastER patients will be charged a registration fee of €20 plus a consultation fee of €100 and all diagnostic investigations will be charged separately. If a patient requires admission, their inpatient care will be covered by their insurance in the usual way.
Dr McWeeney said one of the advantages of having immediate access to an A&E consultant was that patients would not be left waiting on trolleys.
She said: "We very much subscribe to the model of public/private partnership and we understand the large teaching public hospitals have an enormous task in dealing with emergency services. We hope to tie in with those services, but we are not suggesting for a moment that a 101-bed hospital will be able to completely alleviate the pressure on the services in the western region. However, we hope to be able to help patients who otherwise would have to wait 10 or 12 hours on a trolley in another A&E department."
Pointing out that schemes like the National Treatment Purchase Fund were beginning to make inroads into the public waiting lists, Dr McWeeney said she saw no reason why the Galway Clinic could not be much more co-operative in dealing with the overflow of patients from other public hospitals, particularly University College Hospital Galway.
