What is life like for those working in and receiving treatment in Ireland’s regional hospitals? That’s the question we’re asking this week on The Pat Kenny Show.
With three reports from around the country, on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday, and a medical panel Friday Forum discussion to finish the week, we’ll be examining regional hospitals around Ireland, including looking at Waterford, Drogheda and Roscommon.
Two of the major issues facing Irish hospitals are waiting times and overcrowding. Both issues lead to a range of knock-on complications, clogging up hospital services and stretching resources.
There are monthly reports on these issues, from the National Treatment Purchase Fund and the INMO. But these numbers can be hard to sift through and decipher when looking at them at once, so we’ve created these interactive maps, with each one detailing the data on a separate issue.
Each map has a variety of markers, which you can see explained in the key in the map’s bottom right. The larger red markers are a sign of some major problems, whereas a circular yellow dot marks one of the better performers. Click on each marker for that individual hospital's waiting list figures.
Inpatient waiting times
The highest waiting lists, as might be expected, are in the major population centres, but University Hospital Galway stands alone as the only hospital that currently has an inpatient treatment waiting list of over 10,000, with 10,405 patients waiting for inpatient treatment.
Outpatient Waiting Lists
Again University Hospital Galway tops the list, with 35,475 people awaiting outpatient treatment. There are also clusters of high waiting lists in Ireland's major towns and cities, with Cork and Dublin both having multiple hospitals at the higher end of the scale.
Trolley Watch Figures
Finally we look at Trolley Watch figures. These are the INMO's daily numbers on how many patients on beds, trolleys or chairs above the stated capacity on inpatient wards. It's accepted as the best gauge of levels of hospital overcrowding.
In this map we cans see a couple of interesting findings. The most stark issue is the overcrowding at Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda, which towers above far larger hospitals, including all of the Dublin hospitals.
At the other end one notable figure is at one of those hospitals we will visit during the course of our report - University Hospital Waterford. While the trolley watch figure 94 is not low it does give UHW a far more respectable ranking overall than on the waiting lists - in which it ranks within the bottom two or three hospitals in the country on either list.
Each of these markers contains information on the July Trolley Watch figures back to 2006, where available. This gives a better grasp of the trends in relation to hospital overcrowding. Simply click on each marker and the data for the past nine years' July readings will pop up.
Note: The numbers on the map below are the July figures for each year
