There are too many very sick patients in Mullingar at present, too few nurses and no plan to alleviate the crisis”, Westmeath Topic was told this week by the General Secretary of the INMO, Liam Doran.
Separately, a hospital nursing staff member, who agreed to talk under anonymity about the current Midlands Regional Hospital, Mullingar, said the flu crisis had reached a peak, and that emergency departments are besieged by patients affected by the flu virus.
“The general situation is that nursing staff and doctors feel sorry for these patients. There is genuine sympathy there, because the doctors’ and nurses’ hands are tied. They can only do what they can. There’s not enough resources for them.
“This whole thing of releasing more beds and releasing more money-nobody believes any of that. It doesn’t help anyone waiting on a trolley in a corridor. It’s just more lip service to the problem. It needs a complete and total overhaul to solve the present problem.”
The nurse said there was a lot on pressure on staff trying to accommodate patients who needed to be isolated. “The hospital is choc-a-bloc. There is a huge amount of people in isolation so that’s put serious pressure on resources where people have to be in individual rooms. It creates more pressure on the whole system not just the A and E. It goes the whole way up through the hospital and just makes the job harder. If people can’t be nursed at home they need to get in quicker and hit it sooner before it takes hold because if you are coming into hospital you could pick up something else.”
The speaker said that the severity of the outbreak would have been hard for anyone to predict.
VERY VIRULENT
“In fairness no one could have seen this present problem. The present strain of Influenza is very virulent. It could happen at any time. It’s generally older people who are extremely unwell with it and they need to be nursed quicker at home before it turns into something nasty.”
The nurse said that the problem of large numbers of patients on trolleys is one which has been ongoing for several years. “It’s 15 years ago since they have been talking about counting trolleys. The press are just looking for headlines about so many people on trolleys but that’s not addressing the problem.
It should have been sorted out in the past 15 years. The only thing that will solve it is people getting antibiotics in their own house and we’re another five or ten years from that being the standard. It’s a plan that needs to be put in place.”
The Mullingar staff member said that the Government needs to come together in order to form an efficient plan to address the present problem. “There’s no point putting in a plan for the next election and saying we’ll do this and that. There needs to be a ten year cross-party plan. You’re not going to solve it any other way. ”
The nurse was also critical of the HSE saying that funds have not been directed to the areas that are most in need. “The next thing they will come out and say, ‘We’re rebranding the HSE’ and spend millions changing signs rather than looking at the problem on the ground. It’s all knee-jerk reaction. Ireland is made up of knee-jerk reactions. You wouldn’t see this happening in Austria or Germany or Switzerland where there are flu outbreaks the whole time.
“It’s completely farcical, firing money for six months at a problem. You need an overall plan and then at least the general public would know there would be some change in ten years.”
The nurse said the situation was taking its toll on the staff of the hospital who have been promised change before. “It’s affecting morale on the ground because everybody is under so much pressure and people are fed and so used to hearing, ‘it’s going to change’ but it never changes and the doctors and nurses are unfairly getting it in the neck from the public.”
INMO SECRETARY’S VIEWS
The General Secretary of the INMO, Liam Doran said that Mullingar Hospital simply doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the current Influenza outbreak. “If you look look at the midland hospitals, all of them were under unsustainable pressure even before the Influenza outbreak came along. For 2016 Mullingar Hospital had 4,849 people on trolleys and if you go back to 2007 it had 91 so you can see how backward the hospital has gone. Those figures pre-dated the Influenza outbreak, so Mullingar was not coping with the increased levels of demands.”
He went on to say that Mullingar Regional Hospital is in an “impossible situation” and that it simply does not have enough beds or staff members. “It doesn’t have enough staff for the existing beds, let alone additional staff to open any additional beds that might be found. Mullingar is in daily overcrowding and care is being compromised as a result. That is the case whether we have an Influenza breakout or not. It is just simply too under resourced, for the demands being placed upon it.”
Mr. Doran said that there needs to be an aggressive recruitment campaign in order to attract more nursing staff and measures put in place to retain existing staff.
“If you don’t have roots here in Mullingar and have the choice to move, you will move. I think Mullingar have recruited just one permanent nurse in the last few months. Management needs to look at itself very hard. Also the HSE, on a national and regional level, needs to look at itself and say, ‘How many beds do we have and what plans do we have to increase that bed capacity?’Because if don’t increase the bed capacity, we will be having this conversation next year, and the year after with the situation getting worse. There are too many very sick patients in Mullingar, too few nurses and no plan to alleviate the crisis”, Mr. Doran said.
