Shuffling patients around won’t solve the crisis of care at UHL

On January 2nd an internal alert was raised in University Hospital Limerick, closing the hospital to ambulances except in the cases of severe heart attack, stroke or resuscitation.

Following this alert staff were given orders to clean up and clear out the emergency department. Overnight patients on trollies were moved from the emergency department into other wards, most of which, including the intensive care ward, were already dangerously overcrowded.

The result of patient shuffling within the various wards of UHL artificially reduced patient numbers in the emergency department from around 180 on the morning of January 3rd to less than 40 on the morning of January 4th. According to some members of staff, this was preceded by hospital management looking for spaces in other wards that trollies could be pushed into so they would no longer be found along corridors.

Ruairí Fahy, People Before Profit representative for Limerick City North said, “I’ve heard from workers in the hospital of the cynical efforts called for by senior management to hide just how dangerous the emergency department had become: turning away patients in need of urgent care to other hospitals, pushing trollies into wards that are already overcrowded, office staff roped in to help with feeding patients, performing paperwork and checking patient vitals.

“In all, the workers were tasked with clearing up to 150 patients from the emergency department into other wards. All of this impromptu reassignment of staff was done at the expense of other departments, while putting additional pressure on wards that received the new patients. As this clear-out was going on, management were warned of additional risks such as a low supply of oxygen, which could be disastrous with the high level of respiratory infections at the moment, but that was moved down the list of priorities.

“There needs to be an honest assessment of the decisions to remove 24 hour care in Ennis, Nenagh, and St. John’s hospital and to pile all of that pressure onto UHL. Reducing the total number of beds available in the region, massively overworking doctors and nurses and a lack of available housing making it impossible to hire new workers is leaving us circling a drain we can’t escape.”

“People have died from avoidable deaths as a result of the decision to centralise the majority of care for the over 400,000 people living in the region into UHL. It’s clear that opening a new hospital for elective surgery isn’t going to solve the need for emergency care especially when there is also a lack of GPs and ShannonDoc is constantly inundated with calls. The HSE, the Department of Health, the Minister and the UL Hospital Group have failed to provide people with the care they need and are failing the workers by calling on them to hide the levels of dysfunction in the emergency department.”