James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

The Deputy's suggestion that we should send HIQA into the hospital until such time as the SDU report is available and the actions recommended therein are taken is nonsense. If there is a need to send HIQA in following that report, consideration will be given to the matter. It is to misunderstand what the SDU does to say that it must make a morning raid in great drama. Its purpose is to examine, analyse and issue recommendations to support management and staff of the hospital. I have no doubt it will make those recommendations. As I said earlier, I cannot see how taking industrial action will improve or make safer the situation for patients.

The Secretary General of the Department of Health, Mr. Michael Scanlan, received a letter today from Mr. Fergal Hickey, President of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine, the salient part of which states:

Many Irish hospitals are overcrowded. The fact that they or the HSE choose to manifest all of the overcrowding in the emergency departments is inappropriate, clinically unsafe and inequitable. There is now irrefutable international and national evidence that preferentially condensing all of a hospital's overcrowding into one single clinical area, the emergency department, increases the risk of avoidable death and harm not only for those hospital in-patients who remain in the emergency department because no bed is available for them but also for emergency department patients who can be discharged and those who do not wait in the ED to be seen because of excessive delays. A better, fairer, safer way to treat all patients during times of emergency department overcrowding is by implementing a simple patient care practice used successfully in other developed health care systems, namely, the full capacity protocol. Full capacity protocol is an internationally validated protocol. The IAM believes strongly that the full capacity protocol, FCP, is a reasonable measure and fair approach to the significant dangers created by overcrowding of emergency departments. One or two additional patients admitted to multiple hospital wards at times of significant emergency department overcrowding is much safer and more clinically just for all patients than is allowing tens of additional patients to be detained for more than six hours in a single dangerously overcrowded compromised emergency department.

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