Exhausted nurses at the end of their tether

Exhausted Galway nurses have warned hospital managers they will not tolerate a return to the ‘bad old days’ of trolley overcrowding on wards and in the Emergency Department.

The warning comes as figures obtained by the Connacht Tribune reveal that the West of Ireland’s main acute hospital, University Hospital Galway (UHG), is currently short more than 270 nurses.

It has emerged that in the past month nursing staff ‘hit the roof’ one Wednesday at UHG when patients from the Emergency Department and Acute Surgical Assessment Unit were transferred on trolleys onto wards of the city hospital.

Horrified nurses kicked-back and insisted treating patients on trolleys in wards where beds are already full to capacity was not safe.

“Our members went cuckoo,” said Anne Burke, the INMO’s Industrial Relations Officer for the Western Region.

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation immediately sought assurances from management that they would not be returning to the old days of scores of patients on trolleys being the norm.

Overcrowding re-emerged as an issue when some weeks ago there was an explosion in the daily attendances at UHG’s ED.

Usually, 200 attendances per day would be considered quite high, according to Ms Burke, but for a number of days in the lead-up to the latest wards’ trolley overcrowding crisis, there had been 250-260 daily ED attendances.

Read the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now – or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie