HEALTH MINISTER STEPHEN Donnelly has said that “there must be” improvement for patients being cared for at University Hospital Limerick this winter.

He was speaking after scheduled care was cancelled at five hospitals and injury units in the Mid-West for an indefinite period to “de-escalate the UHL site”.

HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster said he could “not stand over” the amount of patients he witnessed at UHL recently waiting to be provided with a “reasonable level” of care.

Speaking at the Department of Health today, Donnelly said that “there is no reason why there shouldn’t be” improvement at the hospital by the busy winter period.

“They’re getting better in almost every hospital in the country. UHL is on its own in terms of the increase in patients on trolleys,” the minister said.

He said, nationally of a target of 5,000 additional beds set out by the Government, about 1,200 beds had been opened, 500 are under construction and a further 3,000 were announced several months ago.

He said, for the second year in a row, the number of patients waiting on trolleys is falling and the amount of time patients wait for care in an emergency departments was also reducing.

“Now we have a major problem in UHL. The five hospitals with the biggest number of patients on trolleys represents half the national figure.

“Places like Tullamore have gone from being in perpetual crisis to no trolleys. More and more hospitals now, they’ve got the capacity, and they’ve embraced the reforms, and it’s working.”

He added: “Where capacity and reform have happened, the trolleys have fallen right down in some places to zero. Where capacity has happened without reform, we’re not seeing the results for patients, it must be both.”

He said the reforms suggested for UHL had not been fully implemented “partly because they’ve been under so much pressure for so long that it is simply more difficult to do reform when you’re firefighting all the time”.

“We need more senior decision makers there on Fridays. Take the bank holiday that’s just gone by. Unfortunately in UHL, while the discharge rate on the Saturday and the Sunday was good, it fell off on the Monday and it fell off on the Tuesday in a way that it shouldn’t have and didn’t in other hospitals.

“So there is a management issue, there is a clinical leadership issue, there is a capacity issue.”