Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent)
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172. To ask the Minister for Health further to Parliamentary Question No. 159 of 21 January 2015, regarding current medical staffing in the emergency department in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin 9, if he will allocate more resources to the hospital, in view of the overcrowding issues in its emergency department [7313/15]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Discussions were held between management at Beaumont Hospital and the INMO at The Labour Relations Commission on 13th and 20th January 2015. A number of measures were agreed to address staffing levels in the Emergency Department. These include:

- increasing the number of nurses on days to 12 and the number of nurses on nights to 11, as part of this additional compliment the hospital will put in place a CNM2 covering a combination of operational and practice development initiatives;

- allocating Health Care Assistants to the Emergency Department to ensure that each shift has two Health Care Assistants (HCA), this arrangement will remain in place until the additional nurses commence employment; and

- increasing the administrative cover in the Emergency Department to facilitate the transfer of patients to wards.

Hospital management will continue to pursue all possible measures to address the difficulties facing the Emergency Department in Beaumont. The agreement reached at the LRC also provides that monitoring of the commitments outlined above will take place on an ongoing basis locally and the parties will engage with each other every 4 weeks in respect of progressing matters.