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THE CLOSURE OF a hospital emergency department in Cork city will force patients to wait even longer to be treated, a local GP has said.
Dr Donncha O’Cuill said the removal of 24-hour facilities from the city’s South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital would make a “significant difference” to services which were already extremely busy.
The HSE announced this morning that the emergency department would be downgraded from January next year as part of a reconfiguration of hospital services in the city, Irish Health reports. Patients will be diverted the other emergency departments at Cork University Hospital and the Mercy Hospital.
Fianna Fáil health spokesperson Billy Kelleher has raised fears that the downgrade could seriously affect services at the other two hospitals, which he said were already under “serious strain”. He added:
The Minister is shutting down a city centre A&E at a time when we already have overcrowding problems at CUH. Around 15,000 patients visit the South Infirmary every year. These patients will now be forced to join the long queues at CUH and the Mercy Hospital, unless proper contingency plans are put in place.
Local GP Dr O’Cuill also told RTÉ’s Drivetime that the city’s emergency departments were already overcrowded. He said: “The difficulty is going o be that there are three emergency departments already extremely busy with long waiting times, and the likelihood is that that will grow even worse.”
Dr O’Cuill also expressed scepticism about the HSE’s plans to reorganise services in the area, saying: “My experience is that when resources are taken away, they don’t appear to be redeployed where they should be.”
A similar shutdown at Roscommon Hospital earlier this year sparked widespread protests.
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the only way out for the government and Dr o reilly is to introduce euthanasia . this will help to alleviate overcrowding in our hospitals . also they will save on medical bills and the guys in Europe will be happy ….
ps. i myself am not in favour of euthanasia . but neither am i in favour of letting people die slowly wwith little or no support .
@David Sheridan PRSI was introduced in the early 1970′s to pay for our A&E visits and outpatients visits and our beds in a Public bed with no extra cost now we pay 100 euros for an A& E visit and cannot tell you what a public bed cost cos fortunately I did not need one we are still paying PRSI as well as this be USC’s and F.G are also going to give us a new one soon too so we are paying for our health over and over and over and over and over …….
The whole city is so small ALL of the hospitals are near the centre.Even the Regional.(The CUH.).
If the staff reduced their astonishingly high paid absenteesim rate it might help.
I thought the reason we pay PRSI was supposed to cover absenteeism…
It’s not about how close it is to the City Centre. A few months ago my mother had fall and broke her wrist. She got X-Rays done in the VHI clinic but needed surgery to get pins so was sent to CUH. I waited with her in the CUH A&E for over 12 hours before they sent her home – at 2 AM. I brought her back at 8 AM like told, she was put in a chair in what seemed to be an old cloakroom for another 12 hours before they found her a trolley. She was then on that trolley all night in a corridor until she got surgery the next morning. So yeah, it’s not about distance to the City Centre, it’s that the existing A&E’s are over-burdened.
I’ll edit your comment there "if the ADMIN staff reduced their high paid absentee rate"
Gotta love Fine Gael…
Thank you Kathleen Lynch, Dara Murphy, Ciaran Lynch, Simon Coveney…..for being a useless shower of langers!!!! (cork phrase, poetic license should void editing langer)
Dr James O’Reilly for President 2018 LOL
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