Maureen O'Sullivan (Dublin Central, Independent)
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470. To ask the Minister for Health the short-term plans in place to relieve the overcrowding in accident and emergency departments; if he will reform the nature of these departments, for instance, by allocating intellectual disability nurses for patients presenting with mental health problems, with a separate triage for those presenting with alcohol and addiction issues; if staff are under increasing pressure due to poor management of departments; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [42955/15]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Last December I convened the ED Taskforce to assist in dealing with the challenges presented by ED overcrowding and significant progress has been made to date.

Additional funding of €117m has been provided in 2015 to relieve pressures on acute hospitals including reducing delayed discharges, lowering the waiting time for Fair Deal funding and providing additional transitional care beds and home care packages. The HSE began its winter planning process early this year. Funding has been made available to support the acute hospital system over the winter period by providing additional bed capacity and other initiatives to support access to care. 197 hospital beds have opened nationally since October with another 38 due to open in the next few weeks. While it is still extremely challenging, the number of people waiting for nine hours or more on a trolley has fallen to, on average, 112 in Quarter 4. This compares with 127 on average in June, and 173 in February.

All hospitals have escalation plans to manage not only patient flow but also patient safety in a responsive, controlled and planned way that supports and ensures the delivery of optimum patient care. Last week I co-signed the ED Congestion Escalation Directive to ensure that progress made to date on overcrowding is sustained and improved upon. The Directive requires hospitals to implement their Escalation Plan whenever the Emergency Department experiences overcrowding and it is expected that this will add to the progress made on overcrowding so far.

The National Clinical Programme for Emergency Medicine encourages, and hopes to ensure, that the diagnosis and treatment of patients in Emergency Departments (ED) is conducted in a way that potential underlying causes for a patient's symptoms including serious underlying injuries and illness are ruled out. For this reason caution must always be taken in streaming of patients to separate areas before they have undergone a medical examination. The ED is the safest environment for the assessment of these patients. Emergency Medicine clinical expertise is required to differentiate between physical injury and the effects of alcohol or other substances and advanced diagnostic imaging is frequently required for such assessment.