Professor Pat Nash, Saolta Group chief clinical director, told a briefing before Monday’s Galway City Council meeting that the pandemic has underlined ‘the need for better infrastructure’ in UHG.
During a detailed presentation Prof Nash also spoke about the demanding challenges being faced on a daily basis by medical staff.
“It reinforces something I’ve been pushing for a long time, that we need better infrastructure,” Prof Nash says.
“We have three wards in the new block which when you come in the gate over to the left near the clinical science building - the Shannon, Corrib, and Claddagh wards.
“One of them was the main Covid ward, but the other wards haven’t had any outbreaks and this is related to the fact that the patients are in single rooms, they all have en suites. That is a major factor in reducing it.
“From my perspective when we look back on how we try to prevent it, and if there is another surge and how we try to minimise it, we need to get the council’s support to get better infrastructure.”
Several Covid outbreaks have occurred in long wards and there has been a significant impact on services provided.
“We have had to reduce scheduled care to practically zero,” he added. “What I mean by scheduled is any booked admissions for multiple reasons. Firstly we didn’t have capacity, also we were concerned if these people were having major surgery and ended up in ICU that we didn’t have the ICU capacity to be able to take these green patients while we needed the capacity for red, the Covid positive patients.”
Discussions continue with the private hospitals in Galway, according to Professor Nash. “We will be engaging with the private hospitals, we have got some access there, but it won’t be sufficient, to try to get some time dependent cancer care done,” Prof Nash says.
“I’m talking exclusively cancer care, even that has had to be delayed in the last week in particular. We will be looking at a strategy in how we can make up time to get all of these patients treated within reasonable time frames going forward.
“We would hope to maintain access into the private hospitals for the next number of months to give us some additional capacity while we regroup after Covid. I expect, though, that it will be a number of weeks before we de-escalate.
“While it is managing at the moment, we nearly reached maximum capacity on a date last week and we’re looking at how we’d get into a secondary surge outside of the main ICU complex. Thankfully we haven’t had to do that. We have been taking significant numbers of critical care patients from Mayo, in particular, but also as far as Letterkenny.”
Up to 30 per cent of the capacity in the private hospitals can be utilised with constant communication among the various stakeholders involved.
“The agreement with both hospitals in Galway - the Galway Clinic and the Bons that they’d give us 30 per cent of their capacity,” Prof Nash confirmed.
“That was only triggered last Wednesday, we have met them and we will continue to meet them to get into the detail. In the last week we have moved all medical oncology inpatient services to the Galway Clinic. So we have taken 20 beds there for medical oncology.
“It is an ongoing dialogue and we aim to maximise up to the 30 per cent access in both hospitals. That will help us address the most critically time dependent surgery. Some major cases will have to be done on the UHG site and I hope we will be able to do some of those once we see the plauteau beginning to drop in hospital.”
