University Hospital Waterford was singled out in the Dail for efficient handling of patient transfers to alternative care settings by Health Minister, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, while it was also said that Letterkenny University Hospital could do ‘dramatically better’.
The Minister for Health was responding to a question from TD Marie Sherlock who asked what the Minister was doing to alleviate record high levels of those waiting to be transferred from hospitals to another care setting.
“On 23 consecutive days between March and April, the number of delayed transfers of care exceeded 500 across our acute hospitals, explained TD Sherlock. “This has a major impact, not only on the people who are caught in hospitals who should no longer be there, but also on admissions.
“We saw that 129 people were waiting over 24 hours on Sunday night for admission to our emergency departments, 16 of them over the age of 75.”
In reply, Minister Jennifer Carroll McNeill acknowledged that patient transfers were a central part of managing hospital capacity and tackling the issue of trolley use in Irish hospitals.
“The focus on delayed transfers of care is an integral part of the focus on trolleys – the whole thing goes together. What we are really talking about is patient flow,” she explained.
“Patient flow matters, and it matters all the time. It matters because of the impact on people in emergency departments, but it also matters to the hospital's ability to bring in inpatient day cases. As the Deputy highlighted, the use of surge means hospitals cannot do endoscopy investigations and so on. They cannot bring in non-time-critical electives. Of course, they bring in time-critical electives like cancer surgery, but not non-time-critical electives.
“That is why the focus on urgent and emergency care, UEC, is important. It is a complete piece. There is no point in focusing on UEC without making sure they have a full awareness of what is available in the nursing homes.
“University Hospital Waterford does that particularly well. It has visibility in its patient control room of all of the passages out of the hospital.
There are others that could do it dramatically better, such as Letterkenny University Hospital, and many of those have a DTOC problem,” added Minister Carroll McNeill.
AARON KENT
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
