UL HOSPITALS GROUP have lodged a planning application for the development of a €9.95m theatre complex at Ennis Hospital.
HSE officials have confirmed that the plans are underway and have been approved under their Capital Programme. A review of pre-operative assessment capacity and process, the location and organisation of equipment and the causes of delays to turnaround times will be carried out by the HSE.
Clare TD, Michael McNamara (IND) has queried the low theatre utilisation rates at Ennis Hospital compared to Nenagh Hospital.
Most recent figures show that Nenagh Hospital’s elective theatre utilisation rate was 71% in April 2022 and 81% in May 2022 compared to 58% and 47% respectively at Ennis Hospital. The overall operation time (hours) recorded from January to May 2022 in Nenagh was 607 hours compared to just 237 hours in Ennis.
UL Hospitals Group cited industrial action by laboratory scientists resulting in samples not being processed and cases being deferred, cases deferred by the hospital due to the absence of key personnel such as a surgeon, patients not attending for their procedures, and the use of the Surgical Day Ward at Ennis Hospital as surge capacity for medical inpatients in defending its lower utilisation rate.
Deputy McNamara said the theatre upgrade is “only one of a number of measures required to address the matter”. He continued, “The development of a theatre improvement programme is central to tackling low utilisation rates in Ennis, which is impacting waiting times for people seeking to undergo procedures”.
“However, there is a range of other measures that can be undertaken to expand operations in Ennis which I have been assured are going to be adopted by the HSE following a Theatre Utilisation Review by Grant Thornton highlighting that scheduled care demand at UHL had a significant impact on utilisation in Ennis last year,” he said.
Staffing concerns were flagged by the Scariff native, “It is unacceptable that key personnel such as surgeons are not rostered correctly to ensure permanent cover in Ennis nor is the ongoing situation of patient overflows from an overcapacity UHL continue to impact hospitals like Ennis and the patients who go there for procedures that they have waited for, in some cases, years. Nenagh clearly did not experience the same issue, which is borne out by the figures that have given to me. I would urge the HSE to expedite its plans, as put forward by Grant Thornton in its commissioned report, to remediate this issue”.
