NINETY-SIX beds are to be opened at the University Hospital Limerick (UHL) in the coming days as the first in a tranche of plans to alleviate the hospital’s overcrowding crisis.
A new unit containing the 96 single beds, which has been under construction for the past three years, will be operational within the next week or so, it is understood.
All of the 96 beds will be additional bed stock, not understood to be replacing any of the existing beds at the hospital.
The €96m development is the first of two 96-bed blocks to be developed at the hospital.
Consistently reported as the most overcrowded hospital in the country, there were 118 patients waiting on corridors and in UHL’s emergency department (ED) for in-hospital bed space on Wednesday morning this week, according to figures from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) – more than twice as many as in the next most overcrowded hospital.
The State’s health watchdog HIQA previously stated following unannounced inspections at the hospital’s emergency department that it found the dignity and privacy of patients in the swamped ED compromised.
Previously HIQA found that UHL was understaffed, posing a significant risk to patient safety.
A year ago this month, HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster issued an apology to the family of Aoife Johnston, following publication of a report into the 16-year-old Shannon girl’s death amid a litany of care failings at the hospital.
Aoife, who it was accepted should have been given life-saving medicine within 10 minutes of arriving at UHL with queried sepsis, received the medicine 13.5 hours after presenting at the ED. She died at the hospital on December 19, 2022.
The report, by retired Chief Justice Frank Clarke, concluded that Aoife’s death “was almost certainly avoidable”.
Mr Clarke warned that unless the fundamental problem of UHL’s overcrowding and understaffing was dealt with, the risk of further avoidable deaths occurring at the hospital would “inevitably be present”.
HSE chief Bernard Gloster stated last year after the report was published: “We failed Aoife and our failure has resulted in the most catastrophic consequences for her and her family.”
UHL clinicians told Ms Johnston’s inquest held in Kilmallock in April last year that the “gargantuanly overcrowded” ED was “like a death trap” on the weekend Aoife presented there.
The ED at UHL has been the only 24-hour emergency department in the Mid West region – serving Limerick, Clare, North Tipperary, and parts of north Cork and north Kerry – after ED units were closed and streamlined to UHL in 2009.
The HSE Mid West was contacted for comment.
