Thursday 2nd April 2015. The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has given a “cautious” welcome to the proposals to deal with overcrowding in hospital emergency departments announced by the Minister for Health today. The IMO was a member of the Emergency Department Task Force set up by the Minister when the crisis arose earlier this year.

Speaking today, Professor Trevor Duffy, President of the IMO welcomed the fact that additional resources have been found and were being allocated now to increase the number of beds available in Nursing Homes under the Fair Deal Scheme and in other areas such as Convalescence and District Hospitals and that further resources were being targeted at the provision of temporary beds in Hospitals until June.

However Professor Duffy warned that this response would not be sufficient to prevent overcrowding in Emergency Departments and Hospitals “while this initial funding is to be welcomed what we need to see now is real investment in bed capacity and chronic care management in General Practice. The real challenge is to prevent a recurrence of the now familiar overcrowding crisis in our hospitals and we believe that a longer term solution will require much more ambition and more investment than the announcement made today.”

Professor Duffy also reiterated the IMO view that the roots of the crisis lay in the successive cutbacks faced by the health budget through the past decade; “Today’s announcement by the Government recognises that a lot of the crisis in emergency departments is financial in nature. Successive budget cuts have undermined the infrastructure of our hospitals and given the slightest pressure, this now manifests itself in overcrowding and chaos”

Professor Duffy repeated the IMO concern at the practice of cancelling elective surgeries as a response to pressure on emergency departments. He said; “elective surgery is typically the cure to the problem that caused the visit to the Emergency Department in the first place. You cancel the elective surgery and you simply ensure that the patient will potentially have to present or re-present at the Emergency Department. ”