Tallaght Hospital doctor says patients are being subjected to “sensory torture” due to trolley crisis
A doctor working in Tallaght Hospital has said patients are being subjected to “sensory torture” due to the ongoing trolley crisis.
On Wednesday Tallaght Hospital had 23 patients in total waiting on beds, with nine of those requiring isolation according to Dr Jim Gray.
Speaking about the crisis Dr Gray said: “We’ve got a trolley crisis. We had four patients in non-designated areas. What I mean by that is these are patients not even in cubicles.
“They are scattered around the emergency department in conduce corridors that are on trolleys awaiting a bed that are on a ward and these patients are in poor conditions.
“They have no confidentiality, they have no privacy, they’re subjected to constant light and noise form the monitors and the lighting, this is sensory torture as I said before.”
In figures released by the INMO this morning (Thursday) the number of patients waiting for beds across the country stood at 578, while in Tallaght the number had almost doubled, from 23 yesterday to 45 today.
Dr Gray continued: “Anyone who knows the hospital like I do, we’ve got one room that is a proper isolation room so we’ve patients in our emergency department requiring isolation for various reasons who have curtains across them for isolation and protection which is a breach in the duty of care to be honest, we just don’t have the isolation capacity in Tallaght for that in the emergency department.
“You cannot function like this. If you are on a trolley for two or three days like we have had recently in Tallaght Hospital it is impossible for them to sleep, so the conditions are very poor for these patients.
“Patients are suffering, and we know that between 300 and 350 patients die on trolleys every year so this is a national ongoing scandal.”
The number of people awaiting beds on Tuesday reached new record levels, with 612 patients across the country’s hospitals, while the number dropped slightly to 602 yesterday according to Trolley Watch figures realised by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.
