Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Challenges Facing Emergency Departments in Public Hospitals: HSE

Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

Yes, there is. We went through the overall numbers earlier on. While the number of 3,200 beds is very high, if one discounts sites that do not do the type of work we are talking about and the 600 public beds, there are potentially approximately 1,450 beds.

Most of those are focused on surgical work, not medical work, so the fact we have 180 means we have 12% or 13% of the real capacity of inpatient beds. We are pursuing more. There are another 50-plus beds that we might be able to get. We would take as many as we could appropriately get but eventually the private hospital system runs out of staff or capacity because it has other work going through it, or appropriate types of staff. It does not have large numbers of, for example, critical care beds or physicians. In some cases, we end up trying to provide clinical support to get access to beds.

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