Lourdes Hospital Casualty Section. What needs to be done?

Biggins

I'm just asking an honest question - What needs to be done with the Lourdes casualty section?

I ask because my mother had to take my epileptic and brain damaged (the two are separate and not as some think - the same thing) brother into it after suffering 8 grand mal seizures yesterday.
After waiting four hours just in the waiting room with only ONE ahead of her - and no one coming to help with the problem, she was eventually forced to take her son. my brother home in order to see that he gets someone to care for him.
This is NOT a thread about him however.

She said the casualty unit below in the Lourdes was a scene of utter confusion and chaos.
There seemed to be people laying about on stretchers (one for two days that she spoke to) in the new casualty corridors, just lying there still awaiting treatment, scans, etc.

What the hell has happened already to this new section and how can more cuts be further made to an already terrible resourced place?
(Was in it myself a few months back with a child. They are seriously undermanned.)

What needs to be done - does anyone have any genuine solutions, even partial ones which might help?
How can the tide be turned?

ShiverinEskimo

This situation is nothing new and has only been worsened since the closure of the hospital in Dundalk.

Unfortunately it'll take the only thing the HSE doesn't have to fix it - Money. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. Ireland is having major problems recruiting junior doctors and every department is grossly under-staffed. The main problems seem to be huge queues for radiology and consults. My father had a mini-stroke 2 years ago and was waiting for 2 days to have an MRI because the only qualified MRI operator has to cycle between Drogheda, Navan and Dublin - Don't have a stroke on a Thursday in Drogheda if you can avoid it. :rolleyes:

By the time he got the scan and the results the clot had dissapated and so they had no idea how large it was or where it has travelled to in his brain. Luckily for my Dad he made a full recovery very soon - I'm sure there's plenty more don't.

It's a mess, it'll be a decade before anything can be done.

Corsendonk

The system is full of fraud too between the private/public split. I have a friend who works as a PA in Dublin for consultants and no way do they ever do the 50/50 split, typically 70-80% private. The public sector so then subsidises the private patients! Madness! The hospital that she works in fills out the dept of health reports based on what the dept wants to hear and what the hospital wants the dept to know.

Even simple things can be done to save money, say you have a medical appointment with a consultant, they have to send to Iron Mountain for your chart eveytime you meet the consultant, send it back to Iron Mountain for costly storage each time. Why can't they have electronic records?

The wards also hold the system up with elderly patients waiting for nursing home places holding up beds and relatives unwilling to take them home in fear that they will lose a nusing home place. If you could clear them you could process patients from A & E more quickly.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

What's needed is to restore the full A&E in the outlying hospitals such as Dundalk.

Onesimus

What needs to be done is a massive national protest for this one hospital. Stopping all traffic and getting out and getting our voices heard. But us Irish are so laid back and soooo easily pushed around we will only ever talk about it on these forums. There are Irish who are willing like the op I'm sure but your only but an oasis in this desert of lazy souls who only give out about it behind the HSE's backs.

Fair play to the protests for the louth hospital but it isnt big enough. A good idea would be to search the world for doctor/nurse volunteers to come and help at the hospital at lourdes. Simply walk in and get to work at taking over the jobs of those getting paid for it.

Wolfe Tone

Ive been in there too many times with family members over the past few months...


Few problems...

Too small
Not enough staff

The staff they have are great, they work really hard.

A few weeks ago one nurse told me that the place was overcrowded the day it opened.

PinkFly

My uncles in it at the mo... Serious problems with his bowels, he heard a lady givin birth last nite thru his curtain and was woken during the nite so he cud give his bed to an elderly lady n waited until 6 this mornin to get to his ward,leavin him sittin in pain on a chair most of the nite.....i believe services such as scans/xrays should be made available at gps/doc on calls to give sum relief to a and e

Shoe Lover

I've heard now that only major incidents will be admitted to A&E in Drogheda. For all other non-urgent incidents like burns, breaks etc, you have to go to Dundalk :mad: This makes me sooo mad!

1. Why did they bother spending the money on the Lourdes if they are going to stop ppl from going there
2. Why did they remove services from Louth County only to move them back there again?

I would love to be a fly on the wall when these decisions are being made!

Also, I cannot believe that they are closing the children's assessment area. I had to bring my niece to it a few weeks ago after she pulled a saucepan of boiling water all over her and it was fantastic! They saw her straight away, the staff were great and it was nice that there were no drunks etc falling around the place!

PinkFly

ill be bringing my son to the Lourdes major or minor injuries, i live cross the road from the lourdes...why the heck would i be driving to dundalk to get sorted....very frustrating indeed!!!

DundalkDuffman

PinkFly wrote: »

ill be bringing my son to the Lourdes major or minor injuries, i live cross the road from the lourdes...why the heck would i be driving to dundalk to get sorted....very frustrating indeed!!!

Well if its minor (and your son is over 14) you are a) getting sorted a lot faster and b) reducing the pressure on Lourdes.

whelan1

there is always the problem in every casualty of people being there that could easily be treated by their gp, i do not understand the mentality of going to a and e with minor problems , thats what the doctor and doctor on call are for.....personally given the choice of paying €45 to gp or €100 to a and e i know which one i would choose:rolleyes:

markc1184

My girlfriends dad had a minor heartattack on Wednesday night. He was in the A&E on a trolley in a corridor for hours and then in a small cubicle until yesterday evening. After being into it yesterday, I know exactly what Biggins is talking about. The place is complete chaos with people on trollies almost from you walk through the doors at the waiting area right down into the unit itself. Even in the unit there are people on trollies in the open which must be embarrassing for some of them. It seems to be a little understaffed too.

Surely when building this multi million Euro A&E department, knowing the size of the catchment area it caters for, there should have been provisions made for a bigger unit. There is not enough beds or staff in it IMO.

ShiverinEskimo

That's the issue right there markc1184 - it was never designed to cope with that catchment area. The HSE's decision to cut costs by closing regional hospitals put the likes of Lourdes and Navan hospitals under even more strain when they were struggling to cope as it was.

What they need is about 800m euro (one one-hundreth of the bank bailout ) to build a large puprose-built hospital somewhere along the M1 that has quick and easy access and can cope with the population of the entire M1 corridor.

But we've seen this week what the decision-making is like when the beaurocrats in the HSE decide the best place for a brand new 600m children's hospital is smack back in the middle of North Inner City Dublin instead of somewhere out around the M50 where parents and patients alike would find it infinitely more accessible for Dubs and Culchies alike.

Like most government departments the people calling the shots at the top are completely out of touch with what is happening at ground level.

cargo

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

This situation is nothing new and has only been worsened since the closure of the hospital in Dundalk.

Unfortunately it'll take the only thing the HSE doesn't have to fix it - Money. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. Ireland is having major problems recruiting junior doctors and every department is grossly under-staffed. The main problems seem to be huge queues for radiology and consults. My father had a mini-stroke 2 years ago and was waiting for 2 days to have an MRI because the only qualified MRI operator has to cycle between Drogheda, Navan and Dublin - Don't have a stroke on a Thursday in Drogheda if you can avoid it. :rolleyes:

By the time he got the scan and the results the clot had dissapated and so they had no idea how large it was or where it has travelled to in his brain. Luckily for my Dad he made a full recovery very soon - I'm sure there's plenty more don't.

It's a mess, it'll be a decade before anything can be done.

If they could spare a few quid to pay for a bus ticket or even a hire car for this person perhaps the waiting times wouldn't be so bad??? Thats a huge distance to have to cycle between scans.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

In fairness I don't think it would have been laid down that the person must cycle. It has to be by choice. Staff get travel expenses so let the guy use them to get between hospitals.

calex71

whelan1 wrote: »

there is always the problem in every casualty of people being there that could easily be treated by their gp, i do not understand the mentality of going to a and e with minor problems , thats what the doctor and doctor on call are for.....personally given the choice of paying €45 to gp or €100 to a and e i know which one i would choose:rolleyes:

This is fine in theory, but guess what happened that last time I went to my gp (recently I might add) needing stitches to a cut on my forearm???????

You guessed it , he told me to go to the lourdes And this is a practice that has a nurse on the premises too and this was 10 in the morning and place wasn't busy at all, So being the reasonable thinking man I am figured sure the gp will stitch me up and if not the nurse should be over qualified. The excuse I got was they would not be covered by insurance.

I told them I felt too weak to walk to the hospital in an attempt to chance my arm and you know what he said...... oh hold on I'll call for an ambulance.

I walked out in disgust :mad: