A consultant in emergency medicine in Sligo hospital has said it is time to address the lack of critical care bed capacity in hospitals rather than seek to reassure people that there is not a problem.

A consultant in emergency medicine at Sligo Hospital has said it is time to address the lack of critical care bed capacity in hospitals rather than seek to reassure people that there is not a problem.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Dr Fergal Hickey said that at the start of the pandemic every bit of capacity was used for Covid-19, along with a drop in attendances at hospital emergency departments.
This has now ended as the system returned to pre-Covid operations.
He expressed concern about the lack of critical care beds available if there is a surge in hospitalisations as a result of the Covid-19 virus.
Dr Hickey said that the 2009 Prospectus Report on Excellence in Critical Care stated there was then 289 beds in critical care.
It recommended that by 2010 418 beds would be required and by 2020 to have 579.
Dr Hickey said this shows that long before the pandemic the country had insufficient capacity in ICU.
There are now 281 ICU beds in the system.
Dr Hickey said that recovery areas in hospital theatres and private capacity can be used for ICU, but the reality is we are short of critical care capacity.
“We need to do something more dramatic than making small incremental improvements from time to time,” said Dr Hickey.
He said we need to take it far more seriously and create additional capacity “and we need to do it now”.
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