Promises of beds are useless unless they will be delivered on time and on budget, writes Terence Cosgrave A s a reader of Irish Medical Times , you will agree with me that we have all been fighting for some time for the Irish health service in one way or another. One of the big issues, of course, is the amount of time a patient might have to spend on a trolley in an Emergency Department while waiting for a bed. Especially in winter.
Books have been written, reports commissioned, white papers have been produced, and appointments have been made, but this problem – or should I say, the solution – has eluded resolution. Many clinical experts – among them the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association – have suggested that the problem is mainly the shortage of beds in acute hospitals. They posited that this one fact was the determining one when examining the over-crowding problem, and many – including the other body most concerned with the problem, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, agreed.
We have head-scratched and chin-stroked out the details in this publication for years. Beds in acute hospital are very expensive. And they need to be staffed – otherwise what’s the point? It’s all very expensive, and lookit, where is the money going to come from? It was, if you like, an intractable problem.
Or so it seemed. As an editor, I was interested and excited if anything new came up in the area. Occasionally, you’d find that somewhere else, someone had had this .
