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

The Deputy will appreciate that I cannot comment on individual cases. I do not have all the information on them. I might never have all the details, for reasons of patient confidentiality and for other reasons. If the Deputy wants to make those details available to the chief executive officer of the hospital, I will make sure the matter is looked into appropriately. He is not the only person who knows doctors and nurses in Beaumont Hospital. I do too. I have visited the hospital on two occasions and the emergency department on one occasion. The doctors and nurses there acknowledge that many factors give rise to overcrowding. It is not just about bed capacity; it is also about delayed discharges, length of stay and other issues. In theory, a hospital in which the average patient spends eight days needs twice as many beds as a hospital in which the average patient spends four days. In practice, it needs to reduce its average length of stay per patient. A reduction of half a day in the average length of stay in a hospital can free up a huge number of beds. Many factors other than bed capacity contribute to overcrowding. On a bad day, there can be 30 or 40 people on trolleys at Beaumont Hospital. If it were as simple as providing extra beds, this problem should be solved by a reduction of 25 in the number of delayed discharges and the opening of 25 beds. That will not happen, however. There are many other factors at play. All of them need to be worked on as well.

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