Frank Feighan (Sligo-Leitrim, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to address the House on this important issue raised by Senator Maria Byrne. I also welcome the publication of HIQA's report of the unannounced inspection of the emergency department at University Hospital Limerick against the national standards for safer better healthcare. Four national standards were assessed as part of the HIQA inspection, two standards in each of the two dimensions of capacity and capability, and quality and safety. HIQA judged that UHL was partially compliant against one standard and non-compliant against the remaining three standards.

The inspection focused particularly on the important issues of patient flow and inpatient bed capacity in the hospital; respect, dignity and privacy for people receiving care in the emergency department; and staffing levels in the ED. As Minister of State, I am concerned about the significant risk to service users identified in the report. I am pleased that the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, recently requested the HSE to appoint an expert review team to work with hospital management to improve ED performance at UHL. In addition, the Minister also requested the HSE to prepare short-term and longer term unscheduled care performance improvement plans for all our emergency departments, including UHL.

The compliance plan agreed by UHL with HIQA to bring about compliance with the relevant standards contains short-term, within three months, medium-term, within six months, and long-term, within three years, actions. The Department of Health is working with the HSE to ensure the ED performance improvement plan for UHL and the expert team review operate in concert with the compliance plan included in the HIQA report.

In addition, UHL also commissioned Deloitte to review and advise on unscheduled care and patient flow in the hospital. The expert team will consider the outputs of this work in its review. Both Deloitte and the HSE expert review team are due to submit reports which are expected to help identify potential mitigations for the problems outlined in the HIQA report.

It must be recognised that University Hospital Limerick continues to deal with record volumes of patients attending its ED.There were more than 76,000 attendances at the emergency department in UHL in 2021, up 16% compared with 2020.

There continues to be substantial investment in UHL to address capacity issues, including a 28% increase in the workforce since the end of 2019 and the opening of an additional 98 non-ICU acute beds. To deal with this increased level of presentations, reform of service delivery as outlined in Sláintecare is vital. This includes the expansion of community care and other measures to provide people with the care they need outside emergency departments. We are working to improve patient flow and egress from hospital by providing more home care packages and nursing home supports. Investment of €1.1 billion was allocated in budget 2021 to expand capacity, increase services and support reform. That level of investment has been maintained in budget 2022.