THE ASSOCIATION representing doctors working in Ireland’s hospital emergency wards has demanded an immediate pledge from the government to end hospital overcrowding “once and for all”.

The Irish Association for Emergency Medicine said it was encouraged by James Reilly’s commitments in the wake of last week’s HIQA report on Tallaght Hospital, when the health minister said the recommendations of the report would be implemented in full in all acute hospitals.

In a statement, the IAEM said it had campaigned “for many years to have the system-wide problems which lead to the lodging of inpatients in emergency wards addressed”.

“We have consistently advocated on behalf of our patients both in terms of their basic human dignity and also the internationally recognised risks of unnecessary death or poorer health outcomes as a result of being boarded in an emergency department,” the association said.

The HIQA report, which had followed an unaccounted inspection, had come after a man had died while awaiting admission to Tallaght’s emergency ward – and seated directly outside it – in March 2011.

After that visit, Tallaght adopted new measures which the IAEM said effectively “fixed its trolley problem within 72 hours”, and which has managed to keep waiting times to a minimum since.

“A change in hospital management and a new management focus abolished the risk almost overnight, at little extra financial cost. This sense of urgency and priority must be applied to all acute hospitals immediately,” IAEM said.

The association also welcomed the affirmation of the “six-hour standard”, where 95 per cent of patients being presented to emergency wards are either admitted or discharged within six hours, with all patients being placed on a ward within nine hours.

The body has previously advocated the adoption of a ‘full capacity protocol’ in hospitals, whereby patients are moved from an emergency department to another ward as soon as they are admitted as an inpatient, as a relatively easy way of saving lives.

The logic behind that approach is that patients are likely to be given better care if they were accommodated across a hospital’s facilities, instead of being concentrated in a single department which also needs to be accessible to new incoming patients requiring urgent care.

Read: Report on Tallaght Hospital describes emergency department as “unacceptable”