More emergency beds crucial before second wave hits — IAEM

There is a serious risk Covid-19 clusters will surface in hospital admission areas when a second wave of the virus arrives unless more beds and waiting rooms are introduced as a matter of urgency, the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM) has warned.

IAEM President Dr Emily O’Connor said now was the ideal time to increase bed capacity in hospital emergency departments (EDs), with the rate of transmission of the virus in the community declining.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland today (June 24), Dr O’Connor said: “There is much less Covd-19 circulating. We are still getting cases of Covid-19 into our hospitals, some of them still requiring intensive care but they are much smaller in number.

“What we are juggling with at the moment is restarting all of the rest of healthcare while trying to continue segregation for any potential Covid-19 cases that might come in.

“We don’t want emergency department waiting rooms to become clusters of Covid-19.

“We urgently need capacity both in space and infrastructure in our emergency departments so that when the second wave arrives, we haven’t discovered that before we knew it was back, patients were sitting in crowded waiting rooms in emergency departments, or patients were sitting on trolleys in corridors in emergency departments.”

Dr O’Connor, a consultant in emergency medicine, added that the IAEM was also recommending that measures should be put in place to ensure that only people who really need emergency treatment were admitted to hospital and that their stay in an ED be kept as short as possible.

“We have this gap now to try and improve things,” she said.

Responding to latest figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre which revealed that 8,172 healthcare workers have been diagnosed with Covid-19, Dr O’Connor said several emergency medicine doctors were currently battling the disease.

“There is no filter between the emergency department and what is happening in the community because we see all-comers,” she said.

peter.doyle@imt.ie