563 Patients Currently Waiting For Hospital Beds Today

563 patients currently waiting for hospital beds today

The INMO says overcrowding at the country's emergency departments has reached an all time high today. 563 people are waiting on trolleys according to the organisation with 14 of them at Wexford General Hospital. Figures released last November showed that there had been a 5-fold increase in the number of patients on trolleys at the Wexford Hospital when 2013 was compared with 2014. Just before Christmas, Health Minister Leo Varadkar convened an emergency taskforce to find solutions to the escalating problem. General-secretary of the INMO is Liam Doran. "There's always a spike at this time of the year" he said. "There's no capacity, people have got to understand: our acute hospitals, day in, day out are running at what we call 100 percent occupancy". "Internationally, it's recognised that if a hospital goes over 85 percent bed occupancy it can't function, it cannot turn over patients properly, safely with privacy and dignity". "Our acute hospitals have been running at that level for months now" he added.