Hospital plan has ‘clearly not worked’
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has stated that the reconfiguration of hospital services in the Mid West, which saw Nenagh lose its 24- hour A&E in 2009, has “clearly not worked”.
But the minister said there is no prospect of reopening the emergency department at Nenagh hospital, or that of Ennis, which also lost 24-hour A&E under the reconfiguration.
Minister Donnelly made his comments during a visit to Nenagh last Friday when he formally opened a regional hub for women’s health at the hospital (see page 15 of this week's Nenagh Guardian). His statement about reconfiguration was welcomed by the ‘Nenagh Needs its A&E’ group, which is campaigning for the reopening of the emergency department. “This is possibly the first time we have had such a high-level admission that the ill-fated programme that saw the decimation of emergency department services across the Mid-West has effectively come to the end of the road,” said campaign spokesperson Dr Conor Reidy.
However, when asked later by reporters about reopening the local emergency department in order to take pressure off University Hospital Limerick, Mr Donnelly said there would be no reopening of these departments in north Tipperary or Clare. The minister conceded that there were “unacceptable” levels of patient overcrowding and delays in Limerick, but went on to state: “The clinical view on this is unambiguous, and the doctors would say ‘no’.
“And the reason they would say ‘no’ is because if you’ve got something seriously wrong with you, and you go into a small hospital – Nenagh has 60 beds – and that doesn’t have all the specialties, and maybe you need one of those specialties, and it’s not there, now you’re in trouble, because now they have to get you to the bigger hospital anyway, and time matters in these cases.”
Mr Donnelly said he had “directed the HSE to significantly increase the number of emergency medicine consultants” at UHL as the Limerick ED was currently struggling with “only eight emergency department consultants and there should probably be about 16, so they are not even close to the numbers they need”.
Nenagh Needs its A&E campaigner Tanya DeVito McMahon pointed out that the minister's comments came in the wake of the recent “bombshell” HIQA report following an unannounced inspection of the UHL ED last March. The report raised serious concerns about patient safety as a result of overcrowding at the Limerick hospital.
"Now that HIQA has spoken, and the minister has made his admission, we must move quickly with a radical short-term plan and a sustainable long-term solution that brings an end to the endless horror stories that people from North Tipperary, Limerick and Clare have been enduring," she said.
Dr Reidy added: "We have been inundated with stories of dire suffering at the University Hospital Limerick Emergency Department. Some people have gone public, some people just want to tell us their stories but for their own understandable reasons, are unable to speak out."
He called for "political will, locally and nationally. We need radical thinking from the powers-that-be. Most of all, we need the suffering to stop. And quickly. No more suffering on trolleys. No more indignity. No more dangerous working environments for medical staff and lethal conditions for seriously ill emergency department patients."
Established in 2019 in response to worsening ED conditions at UHL, Nenagh Needs its A&E quickly linked with similar campaigns in Limerick and Ennis, and all three now operate under the umbrella of the Mid-West Hospitals Campaign.
Having brought a motion on the matter to the HSE West Forum, Nenagh councillor Séamie Morris is now seeking a date for a meeting between the management of UHL and Mid West councillors. Clare councillor Liam Grant, who brought the motion along with Cllr Morris, requested that representatives of the Mid-West Hospitals Campaign also be present.