*Stephen Donnelly speaking to members of the media including Páraic McMahon (The Clare Echo) and Dan Danaher (The Clare Champion).
IN ORDER to tackle ongoing overcrowding at University Hospital Limerick (UHL), a decision on whether to equip hospitals such as Ennis or Nenagh with more services or hire more staff to UHL will have to be made, the Minister for Health has admitted.
Repeated calls have been made for Ennis Hospital to be upgraded to a model three hospital since it was downgraded in 2019, however this stance was rejected by UL Hospitals Group in 2019. UHL’s position as one of the country’s most overcrowded hospitals has deteriorated in this time.
Speaking in Croom, Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly TD (FF) detailed that he would “led by the doctors” on any call to upgrade facilities such as Ennis or Nenagh. “The advice for some time has been healthcare, particularly emergency care has become more and more specialised. What can be dangerous for the patient is coming into a hospital which doesn’t have all the specialities available, they are in there and they might crash, they might get much worse while they are in there and don’t have the specialities available”.
He outlined that minor injury units such as those in place at Ennis Hospital “can do a lot of heavy lifting” to ease the burden on UHL. “I know there are patients arriving into the emergency department in Limerick who undoubtedly could go to a minor injury unit, we have to make sure we have enough GPs, one of the things I was hearing is we don’t have enough GPs, they need to be resourced and hired, we need really good out of hours GP coverage as well”.
Too much has been asked of UHL, he conceded. “Regardless of whether it is more emergency departments, the expert advice I get is patients who are in a really bad way need to come to a big hospital for the best care, we have to make sure all of the other parts of the system are in place as well because the whole system has to do the lifting. What I’m seeing at the moment is University Hospital Limerick is being asked to do much of the lifting for the whole area”.
Established in December, the Regional Health Areas Advisory Group is to work to actively progress the establishment of six new Regional Health Areas (RHA). This health authority will be best placed to decide whether services are enhanced at Ennis or whether more staff will be added to UHL, Minister Donnelly stated.
This will also include a link of community and hospital care, “we shouldn’t be designing healthcare around hospital or community care, we’ve got to design it around locations, that means investing in community care, GP care, public health nurses and all of that, primary care centres and the model two hospitals, almost as the last resort for the really complex stuff you have the hospitals like University Hospital Limerick”.
Minister Donnelly told The Clare Echo that he did not believe the creation of the RHAs would strengthen the argument for Department of Health Secretary General, Robert Watt to consider taking a pay cut from his salary which will top €300,000 this year.
“There is a level of ambition for reform that this Government has which obviously the Department of Health, myself and other Ministers, the HSE, hospitals and community areas locally are involved in, we are doing things now at a level that haven’t been done in a long time, we’ve been dealing with COVID, our health professionals have been incredible with vaccines, testing and tracing and keeping the whole system on the road at the same time. At the same time, we’ve added more beds in the last year than any year on record, we’ve added more healthcare professionals, last year and the year before, the two biggest years on record, we’re in the middle of a huge amount of reform so moving to the regional health authorities is one part of it, our ambition for universal healthcare in this country is such that there is going to be a lot more work”.
