Bed shortage forces hospital 'off-call"

Our Lady"s Hospital, Navan, had to go off-call and was unable to take any emergency patients due to a severe shortage of beds in the hospital on Tuesday of last week, according to Navan Fine Gael local election candidate, Suzanne Jamal. Ms Jamal said there were 17 patients waiting for admission to hospital beds and that because the emergency department was full of extra trolleys, the day ward was being used to accommodate these patients. As a result, many day surgery patients had to have their procedures cancelled. She said that elderly patients had to spend the night on trolleys and were then told they were being transferred to the Louth County Hospital in Dundalk for their treatment. 'This was upsetting enough but imagine how inconvenient and upsetting it is for the patient and relatives who had to travel over and back to Dundalk to visit,' she said. Ms Jamal said the situation is 'simply unacceptable' and is likely to arise again because Navan Hospital is working with 20 less beds due to renovation work. She said that taking the 20 beds out of an acute hospital system without putting alternative arrangements in place would result in 'chaos'. 'It is not the case that nothing could be done, I have worked many years in the health service, including the area of bed management ,and I can confidently say that there are simple solutions to the problem. Basic common sense in such a situation seems completely absent in this case,' she said. According to Ms Jamal, there are approximately 18 patients at any one time in Our Lady"s Hospital who are considered long-term patients and need to be in a nursing home or respite bed rather than in an acute hospital one. 'Although the problem is clear to be seen, no resources were put in place to find appropriate accommodation for these patients. There is a serious deficit of long-term care beds in this region, and especially in County Meath. The people of Meath deserve better than this. The winter initiative appears to be half-hearted, inadequate and under-resourced. St Joseph"s Nursing Home in Trim, which was traditionally relied upon to move these patients to, is working at less than half its capacity. Where is the sense in this?' added Ms Jamal. She added that the new facility to replace the County Infirmary is being built, but is not going to be sufficient. At the same time, there are beds not in use in the regional orthopaedic unit at Our Lady"s. 'Under this severe pressure, I fail to understand what is stopping the use of any potential capacity in the hospital,' said Ms Jamal. She said she is asking the HSE and Health Minister Mary Harney why there has been no arrangement made to find long-term beds for more than a dozen patients who are in acute hospital beds in Navan through no fault of their own and why existing bed spaces in the hospital are not being utilised to their full capacity. She has also queried why the newly opened Medicial Assessment Unit (MAU) in the hospital is being seen as an 'interim measure'. She said: 'Whilst I welcome the establishment of the Medical Assessment Unit in the hospital, which is, to my knowledge, working well and is going to result in avoidance of unnecessary admissions to the hospital and giving access to GPs for a fast-track investigation of their patients, I fail to see the sense in declaring this useful facility 'an interim measure". Why spend millions of taxpayers" money on something which is proving useful and still keep it on a temporary basis?'