Up to 20 patients a night are being treated on chairs at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital because no trolley or bed is available, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has said.
Patients were spending up to 70 hours on trolleys in the current overcrowding crisis in the hospital’s emergency department, the INMO said.
The maximum stay is 40 hours, according to the hospital.
Noise ‘humungous’
"It's disgusting to watch," said emergency department nurse Moira Wynne of the INMO. "The noise level is humungous, there is no dignity or privacy and elderly patients are disoriented."
One of the patients forced to sit overnight on a chair was a man recovering from a hip operation the previous month, she said.
Padded chairs
Ms Wynne said the department can accommodate only 26 extra patients on trolleys. After that, patients are assigned padded chairs to sit on.
Asked about this, the hospital responded: “Depending on requirements, Beaumont has between 20 and 30 treatment spaces on any given day.”
Over recent weeks, there have been up to 49 more patients than there are beds.
Minister for Health Leo Varadkar predicted the overcrowding situation at the hospital would ease over the next few days.
People have been asked to avoid Beaumont’s emergency department and potential patients have been urged to visit their GPs for treatment instead of arriving at the hospital.
Mr Varadkar said the problem was not unique to Beaumont. “The run-up to Christmas is always a very busy time in emergency departments,” he said. “Beaumont is under particular pressure, but it’s not the only one.”
Discharging patients
He said the hospital had introduced a number of measures, including postponing some elective admissions and discharging patients as much as possible.
The INMO, which called for the overcrowding crisis to be declared a national emergency, said 386 people were waiting nationally in hospital emergency departments, or on wards, for admission to a hospital bed. Thirty-three of these were at Beaumont.
The hospital has cited a number of contributory factors, including an increase in admissions and the fact its catchment area has an older than average population. It says changes to cancer services and recent service developments in the hospital have drawn on its limited bed capacity and affected emergency department capacity.
Beaumont went “off-call” for about four hours on Friday, during which time emergency cases were diverted to other hospitals.
