Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, a shameful 601 people who had been admitted to hospital were left lying on trolleys. A record 601 people, who needed a bed and appropriate care, were put through the indignity and needless suffering of being left on a trolley in an overcrowded accident and emergency unit. Nurses, absolutely at the end of their tether and run off their feet, have now been forced by the Minister to protest and take industrial action because of the inaction of the Government to deal with this crisis. As professional health workers, they now feel that it is safer to turn people away from accident and emergency units than to admit them.

Contrary to years of the Government mantra about how it is all about efficiencies and it is not about throwing money at the health service, the INMO is categorical. What is needed is for the 2,000 beds that are closed in the system to be reopened. Thousands of nurses need to be recruited to provide the care for those who will occupy those beds. The INMO states that 523 beds which are closed could be reopened tomorrow if the resources and nurses were provided and that the other 1,500 beds could be opened fairly quickly if the Minister recruited the nurses. That means demanding of the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and the Taoiseach that the budget for the health service, which is utterly inadequate, be raised to reverse the damage of thousands of beds and thousands of nurses being taken out of the health service and to put those back in to deal with this crisis.

The international best standard is hospital bed occupancy of 85%. We are running at 100%, and we have unloaded more on top of that from the small accident and emergency units that have been downgraded and closed. That is the crisis. The Minister has been told what he could do to address it. Will he do it?

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