HIQA advice to the Minister for Health on whether the Mid West needs a second emergency department (ED) will not be available until at least September, it has been confirmed.
The frustrating news news comes in a week when there were 102 admitted patients waiting on trolleys for an in-hospital bed at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) on one day alone, according to figures released the Irish Nurses and Midwives Union (INMO).
The review of emergency services in Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary was due to be on Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s desk by the end of May, but HIQA has put a revised deadline on the deilvery.
Hopes have been raised that the report will firmly state the case in favour of a new ED and it was envisaged that this might give impetus to a fast-build which could see a second ED ready to cater for the population of 400,000 across the Mid West region within two years.
The healthcare regulator said it is waiting for the ESRI to finish an analysis of emergency care demand up to 2030 by region to inform HIQA’s advice to the Minister.
A HIQA spokesman has now said it does not expect this ESRI work to be completed “until later in the summer”.
As a result, “the revised timeline for completion of the HIQA final report will therefore be September 2025, contingent on the completion of the ESRI reports within the expected timeframe”.
The delay came to light when the Minister shared the revised deadline with Social Democrats TD Pádraig Rice, Oireachtas health committee chairperson, in response to his parliamentary query.
She said the revised date was shared with her on May 28.
“This review will provide advice to me, as Minister for Health, to inform decision-making around the design and delivery of urgent and emergency healthcare services in the Mid West,” she said, promising that the final report will be published.
The review was commissioned in the wake of tragedies in the overcrowded ED, including the deaths of Shannon schoolgirl Aoife Johnston (16) in December 2022, Martin Abbott, aged 65, in 2019, and Eve Cleary, aged 21, also in 2019.
