UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL LIMERICK has said elective procedures will resume tomorrow morning after they were postponed earlier this week due to overcrowding.
At a meeting of the hospital’s management team this morning, it was decided that “elective surgical activity across all sites” would resume tomorrow morning. The sites include University Hospital Limerick (UHL), St John’s, Ennis, Nenagh and Croom Orthopaedic Hospitals.
In a statement issued today, the hospital said: “Postponement of scheduled elective activity is a decision of last resort that no hospital manager wishes to make,” adding that it regretted the impact on patients.
It said the hospital would “work to ensure these appointments are rescheduled at the earliest opportunity”.
The hospital had said on Monday that it was”experiencing extremely high demand” and appealed to the public to “consider all care options” before going to the emergency department.
The hospital said that it had been caring for “an exceptionally high number of unwell medical patients” and that the emergency department had seen the highest number of people presenting there since the beginning of the year, with a daily average of 245 patients.
As a result, it said scheduled activity across all its sites was deferred till the following day and that was the case again today, with the exception of time-critical patients, including cancer patients.
The Government has faced repeated criticism for the overcrowding at UHL and beyond from opposition parties in the Dáil this week.
Today, both Labour and Sinn Féin leaders Ivana Bacik and Mary Lou McDonald used their time at Leader’s Questions to demand action on the state of the healthcare system, with particular reference to the Limerick hospital.
Bacik said that in talking to people who have been affected by overcrowding and understaffing, including patients and healthcare workers, the word she repeatedly heard was “chaos”.
She told of one doctor who said he was going to move abroad because of the level of overcrowding in the hospital where he works.
Bacik said the doctor feared that if something went wrong with a patient under his care because his attention was stretched across too many people, he would be blamed.
McDonald, having raised the issue in the Dáil yesterday, told Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney – standing in for the Taoiseach today – that the Government’s attitude was that there was “nothing to see here”.
McDonald described the Government’s position as “delusional”.
Coveney refuted that characterisation of the Government’s position, as did Leo Varadkar in yesterday’s session.
Coveney said that over the last four years there had been progress in addressing both staff shortages and overcrowding across the healthcare sector.
On UHL, Coveney said the Government “is stepping in” and “has invested significantly in University Hospital Limerick and will continue to do so”.
He said staffing at the hospital has grown my over 1000 since the end of 2019 and that the Government would continue to invest “as much as is necessary”.
He said that the hospital’s budget had increased significantly between 2019 and 2023.
“Its budget has grown by 118 million over that period. That’s an increase of 45%, and badly needed, in just four years,” he said.
“So the calls for more investment, more capacity, more staff are being met by government allocation of resources and we will continue to do that to address what is a significant pressure in this hospital.”
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