Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 November 2020

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

HSE Winter Plan: HSE

Mr. Paul Reid:

There are two aspects to the question: ventilators and total critical care bed capacity. I will take the latter first. We do have, as the Deputy said, quite rightly, a lower benchmark across OECD countries for our critical care beds. We had 255 at the start of Covid and we are now at 285 beds. We have a further 17 as part of the funding throughout the winter, which brings the total up to just over 300. The investment for the service plan brings us to 320. We do have a surge capacity which we would utilise and we had planned for in the first phase. Thankfully, we did not have to use it. That would bring us up to about 350 or 360, but that is using high-dependency unit beds and pre- and post-operative theatre beds that we do not really want to use as there is a higher level of risk involved, obviously, and there is the training of staff for those beds.

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