Retired hospital consultant Fergal Hickey says the crisis at ED departments around the country will continue to get worse until major decisions are made to increase bed capacity in the health system.
Fergal Hickey who retired last month after sending almost 30 years as consultant of emergency medicine at Sligo hospital has advocated for more capacity to solve the continuous overcrowding at ED for several years now.
The former consultant says many politicians have been quoting the Slaintecare programme as the thing which will resolve all issues including bed capacity, but that simply isn't the case.
He says we need to learn from the past in accepting that major changes are needed to ensure people can be properly attended to in our healthcare system:
The assumption that Slaintecare will come along on a white horse and solve all our problems... politicians have hung onto that notion for far too long.
The bed capacity reviews that have been done the assumption they made about the success of slaintecare are completely out of line and way too optimistic.
So until we get some one who says we have to fix this.... we've done this before, for example the TB hospital builds in the 40s and 50s.
