Tackling lengthy outpatient waiting lists and overcrowding at University Hospital Galway must be two of the top priorities of the incoming Fine Gael/Labour Government, the chairperson of the HSE West’s regional health forum said this week.
Fine Gael city councillor Padraig Conneely says the spotlight must be on patients and how the health service can be revamped to best meet their needs.
“The out-patient waiting list for UHG is massive, at the last count there were 29,000 people on out-patient waiting lists to see a consultant, that number would fill Pearse Stadium on Connacht final day. I don’t think it has reduced much since.
“A&E must be looked at closely, too, especially the whole area of assessing patients. If you go in with a stroke or a heart attack and I go in with a sore small finger because I caught it in a door we will both be in the same queue for treatment. There is a need for a different assessment system which operates from when a patient enters the emergency department.”
Waiting times in the ED are also an issue of major concern with patients still having to be accommodated on trolleys, stresses the former mayor. This practice is of even greater concern in the wake of a groundbreaking study carried out at St James’ Hospital in Dublin which revealed that up to 100 patients may be dying prematurely every year because they are forced to endure long waits on trolleys in A&E, he said.
“You still have a situation in Galway where patients can be waiting two days on trolleys because there is no bed available yet 140 beds are closed. Caring for people on trolleys is difficult for the nurses and it is undignified for patients. Everyone is looking at them, they are like objects of curiosity. If you are lucky in A&E you will get tea and toast otherwise family members have to go across the road to get chips for patients. A lady told me once she nearly died of hunger there, her family was out the country and she had no-one to get her anything.”
Cllr Conneely says once patients are admitted the nursing and medical care at the west’s flagship hospital is “very good”. The problem is the delay they can experience waiting to be admitted.
He says under the last government the “HSE like Fianna Fail was a toxic word”.
“The HSE and the whole hospital system was a disaster over the last number of years. The last government failed, it created a monster in the form of the HSE. There were layers of bureaucracy, it was bogged down in administration and financial constraints, it was cut, cut, cut. On a scale of 10 the patient was number three.
“Dr James Reilly [widely tipped as the likely new Minister for Health] has a great handle on health and a very commonsense approach.”
