Dr. Mike O'Connor:

As the Senator will be aware, the HSE support team, which is a collaboration between community, acute operations and the performance monitoring and improvement unit, went into University Hospital Limerick in July and met highly motivated staff dealing with an extremely high volume of work. It probably has the highest attendance of any hospital in the country. In addition, it has the highest attendance of patients over 75 of any hospital, and it is unique in that it does not have a model 3 hospital in its group nor does it have large private capacity in the region it can decant to, so it has a unique set of challenges. We found the leadership team to be focused on areas it needs to improve. The hospital remains challenged but we focused on how we can optimally improve integration between the hospital and the community and how we can look at efficiencies within the hospital. A new area for the over-75s only has opened in the emergency department, which is probably the first in the country. We also focused on the long-stay patients who are in hospital for more than 14 days. That process continued for approximately four weeks and the engagement continues. There are some issues relating to how the medical on-call rota is constructed, which is a technical piece and we have ongoing engagement about that. These internal processes and external integration pieces take time.

In response to the Senator's original question about the 87 people who are on trolleys, I apologise on behalf of the HSE. It is a terrible thing. There are a unique set of challenges in Limerick, we are working through them, and the group has a clear idea of-----