Dr. Emily O'Conor:

The cycles are longer than that. I am sorry that perhaps I am speaking from cynical experience, but the emphasis will go off trolley waits in the next couple of weeks. We will still have lots of patients on trolleys but the media will stop picking up on it and, without meaning to cause offence, governmental interest will stop focusing on it. Media interest might go onto patients waiting for elective surgery. They are real patients who need to be seen. Hospital management will have to respond to that. We often use our surgical day ward capacity as a safety valve. The surgical day ward does not normally take patients off the waiting list but on occasion, hospital management would close it to the waiting list and open it to the ED and yet that means patients will be off the elective waiting lists.

Our management will respond to the directives from above. It is a see-saw and there is simply not enough bed capacity to accommodate both.