The first meeting of the Emergency Department Taskforce has heard a call from the nurses union for the cancellation of all elective admissions to acute hospitals, for the month of January.

The INMO said it was in the interest of patient safety, in light of the worst level of Emergency Department overcrowding in over ten years.

The Emergency Department Taskforce was established by the Minister for Health Mr Leo Varadkar, and today's meeting was attended by all health service unions and senior management from all areas of the HSE.

General secretary of the INMO, Liam Doran said there's no quick-fix solution to the problem:

“If there were easy solutions to this I think we’d have found them by now but we need additional bed capacity we need additional staff. We need some in house work practice changes and they all have to happen very quickly,” he said.

“But in the short term we have a severe problem. We had 280 plus people on trolleys today, the same day last year we had 88. So that shows the extent of the problem going into the Christmas week, which in theory is meant to be a quiet week by tradition,” he added.

Mr Varadkar said that there is “double counting” in terms of hospital waiting lists, whereby several individuals are included more than once for various reasons.

“Nobody’s been trying to hide anything here and also I wouldn’t necessarily assume that if there are inaccuracies in waiting lists they’re all on the wrong side.”

“It is definitely the case that there is double counting: People who are referred to three doctors for the same condition, people who have already gone privately but are still on waiting lists or people who have left the country and are still on waiting lists,” Mr Varadkar said.