Spending four days on an emergency department trolley is an “effective form of torture”.

That’s according to Dr Mick Molloy who spent four days on in an ED last year and still hasn’t “fully recovered” to this day.

It follows a protest against “absolutely horrendous” conditions at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) last week, the most overcrowded hospital in the country.

Experience

On The Hard Shoulder today, Dr Molloy, an Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) consultant, said his experience at an unspecified ED in Ireland last year will stay with him forever.

“It ended up being an almost four-day stay in the emergency department because there were no beds in the hospital to be admitted into,” he said.

“It occurred over a bank holiday weekend; I was seen morning and evening by the medical teams in charge and there were no staffing issues - the hospital was just too full to move people from EDs to wards.

“Having all the additional staff is great but you still need beds.”

'Torture'

Dr Molloy said the prolonged stay in the ED was incredibly difficult for him.

“It’s a very effective form of torture because you don’t sleep well and the lights are on constantly, as they have to be in an environment that is a 24/7 workplace,” he said.

“The ED environment isn’t set up for people to get routine medical care, nor routine personal care - such as meals or assistance to get to a toilet.

“You need to be in a room in a ward where you can sleep and rest where there isn’t activity on a 24-hour basis, where there is an ability to close your eyes and sleep.

“You can’t rest in an environment with brand new people coming in every 15 or 20 minutes, some people who are quite stressed and in pain from fractures, industries, chest pains – whatever the condition is.”

University Hospital Limerick, 29-7-23. Image: Karlis D / Alamy

Dr Molloy said he doesn’t believe the issue of overcrowding at UHL is properly understood.

“The Minister said last week they had increased staff by 41% at UHL and to me, there are two messages from that; the first being they were extremely understaffed for a long period of time,” he said.

“Number two, there is still a lack of understanding of the core problem which is that UHL was too small to cope with the additional volume of patients that came with the closure of Nenagh and Ennis EDs.

“It’s a failed experiment that we need to address very quickly for the population in that area.”

Easy solved

Dr Molloy said solving the overcrowded hospital crisis in Ireland should be “as easy as ABC”.

“We need more acute beds - that’s it,” he said.

“We are grossly undersupplied with beds in every hospital. It’s not a single hospital, it’s everyone.

“Unfortunately, Limerick has gotten a lot of bad press in recent weeks but if you look at it, there isn’t another model three or four hospital in the region.”

Main image: A hospital worker wheels a patient on a trolley through a ward after an NHS operation. Image: Alamy.com