Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Beaumont is an overcrowded hospital. There is no denying that. All efforts are being made to improve the situation. That the number of delayed discharges has been reduced from 95 to 70 has freed up 25 beds. This decrease needs to be sustained and we need to reduce delayed discharges further. That will involve more nursing home places and more home care, but not necessarily more acute hospital beds.

The ward that was closed for refurbishment has now partially reopened. Six beds are open and a further 21 beds are yet to open.

While I do not have the statistics for the special delivery units before me, I have the numbers from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation. According to those numbers, some 586 people spent time on a trolley at Beaumont Hospital at some point in November. That can range from one or two hours to a very long period of time. The figure for November 2014 was 729. This means that based on the numbers from the nurses' union, there was a 20% reduction from November 2014 to November 2015. Clearly, we need to do even better than that. I remind Deputy McGrath that there are plenty of examples of hospitals where we have put in lots of extra beds but it has not worked. Additional bed capacity is not the only factor that gives rise to hospital overcrowding - if only it were that easy - because there are many other factors at play.

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