A leading group of consultants and doctors have said that hundreds of people may be needlessly dying in Ireland every year due to to chronic overcrowding.
The claims were made by members of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association during a conference in Kilkenny yesterday. It also emerged that the health service requires the construction of six new hospital facilities if the standard of care is to be in any way compliant with international standards.
Dr Fergal Hickey said that: “Capacity in system is a major problem so we are short on certain physical elements of the hospital service, I mean you will know, that the evidence is with that with the emergency department crowding somewhere between 100 and 350 patients per year die who wouldn’t otherwise die.
“So there is a similar scenario when it comes to critical care beds and if there was a delay in getting to an intensive care unit of more than six hours than your mortality goes up.”