The Health Minister promised to have more hospital consultants working on-site on weekends, saying she “wasn’t pleased” with a recent roster, reports Breaking News.
According to Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, she met with Bernard Gloucester, the head of HSE, in recent weeks to establish a strategy to schedule additional experts and top decision makers for the weekends.
She stated that she wishes to stay away from the images of hospital trolley congestion that occur on the St Brigid’s Day bank holiday nationwide, reports Breaking News.
According to her, patient safety and maintaining the administration of public services are more important than “work-life balances.”
According to the Fine Gael TD, she frequently monitors hospital trolley numbers.
“I can see the lift, I think approximately, forgive me now, but approximately, say this last weekend, from about 160 on Saturday morning to 420 on Monday morning,” she said on Wednesday.
“That may not be exactly right, but that’s about typical for each weekend. I’m very focused on a bank holiday coming up at St Patrick’s Day, which, as I said, also coincides with one of the largest public order spikes that we see, based on the CSO data, and to make sure that there is appropriate cover from senior decision makers and their supporting teams in every hospital around the country. With that in mind, I have been working with Bernard Gloucester over the last number of weeks to identify what is the plan for rostering consultants and senior decision makers. I don’t mean on call, I mean on site. I’ve had sight of some of those rosters, say last week, and I wasn’t pleased,” reports Breaking News.
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“But I see a much better set of planned rosters this week for each of the hospitals of their emergency departments. Again, it’s not exactly where you’d want to get to, but it’s certainly an improvement. Now let’s see what happens over St Patrick’s Day and the management of the hospitals, because I do recognise there’s two things going on. One it’s about the presence of senior decision makers and their supporting teams. It is also about the whole of region approach to getting people out of hospitals. That works very well in some instances and less well in others, and everybody has to be consistent in relation to it,” reports Breaking News.
According to the minister, the healthcare system should be run in a way that “responds to patients’ needs” because the number of employees has increased.
She added: “This is about patients. It’s not about work life balances. This is about patients and making sure that we are managing our public services generally, to respond to their needs and to their care,” reports Breaking News.
She said that although the number of trolleys increased from 2023 to 2024, there has been “quite a lot of drift” since the start of this year.
She said that although the number of trolleys increased from 2023 to 2024, there has been “quite a lot of drift” since the start of this year, reports Breaking News.
As she introduced three Women’s Health Fund initiatives to safeguard and enhance heart health in women with or at risk for heart failure, the Dun Laoghaire TD made the remarks.
In Ireland, heart disease or stroke claims the lives of one in four women, and heart failure is a serious health problem that affects about 50,000 women annually.
By supplying information, creating recommendations, and establishing services that will eventually result in better prevention and treatment, the three programs seek to address the disproportionately larger effect of heart failure and cardiovascular disease in women, reports Breaking News.
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