Setback to hopes of new hospital?

An expert report is still awaited on how the people of north Tipperary can avoid chronic hospital overcrowding and have access to a second emergency department in the Mid-West.

The inability of the existing emergency department at University Hospital Limerick  (UHL) to cater for the health needs in the region resulted in a decision by the last Government to order the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) to compile a report on emergency healthcare in the Mid-West.

The report was due to be published at the end of May. However, HIQA has yet to confirm a date of publication.

Health campaigners in north Tipperary, Clare and Limerick have called on the Government to provide a second emergency department in the region.

But their campaign appears to have been dealt a blow as Ireland South Independent MEP and former Clare TD Michael McNamara questioned the HSE Mid-West’s “reported recommendation” against the construction of a new Model 3 hospital that would provide a second emergency department in the region.

In a statement issued by Mr McNamara to this newspaper, he said that such a recommendation by the HSE Mid-West “is very difficult to reconcile with the persistent crisis in unscheduled emergency care at University Hospital Limerick.”

The MEP said public representatives were informed of the HSE Mid-West’s recommendation on Thursday last.

Mr McNamara added: “The HSE’s reasoning is that a new hospital would be difficult to staff, with a preference instead for expanding the current UHL site or developing a second linked site - but maintaining a single emergency department.”

He rejected this reasoning. “I don’t understand how it would be more difficult to attract staff to a newly built Model 3 hospital than to an already overstretched and under-resourced UHL, which has long had a reputation for more patients per bed and per staff member than any other hospital in Ireland,” he said.

“Staffing allocations are based on beds, not patients, and UHL’s patient load is uniquely high, he said.

“That’s why it has such a difficult reputation and why it struggles to recruit,” said Mr McNamara.

He said that while UHL clinicians, staff, and local TDs are doing their best, the structure of healthcare governance was broken.

“We can’t keep treating UHL like it can absorb the entire region without serious structural reform,” McNamara said. “This is no longer about local management. It’s about national planning, political will, and system-wide responsibility.

“If we want to future-proof emergency care, we need more than meetings. We need a system capable of acting on its own evidence,” he said.

HIQA REPORT

Over 1,100 public submissions have been made to HIQA as part of the process in compiling its report on whether a second Model 3 hospital is required in the region.

The review was announced by former Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly in May last year.

It was ordered just weeks after an inquest into the death of 16-year-old Aoife Johnston, from Shannon, Co Clare. The inquest was told she waited over 12 hours to be seen by a doctor and treated for sepsis when she attended the overcrowded emergency department at UHL in December 2022.

A subsequent report by the former chief justice Frank Clarke found her death was “almost certainly avoidable” and warned of the risk of a “reoccurrence” despite improvements at the hospital since 2022.

Tanya McMahon who chairs the group ‘Nenagh Needs its A&E’ has told RTÉ’s Drivetime that she believes the former emergency department in Nenagh Hospital, closed in 2009, could be reopened.

Ms McMahon said campaigners in north Tipperary are “desperately clinging on and hoping that the HIQA review will lead to another emergency department being provided in the Mid-West.

“It doesn’t matter where it is”, Ms McMahon told Drivetime.

“As long as we get another emergency department” in Clare or Nenagh, because “something has to be done” to ease what she said was a “healthcare crisis” in the Mid-West.