Tipperary TD says up to 134 people may have died in January due to hospital crisis

Up to 134 patients forced to wait more than six to eight hours for admittance to a hospital bed in January may have died as a result of this unacceptable wait, according to Tipperary TD Michael Lowry.

This highlights the urgent need to take a new approach to the challenges within our health service, said the Independent TD and members of the Regional Group of TDs. 

The group of TDs move a motion in Dáil Éireann this Wednesday morning to seek to overhaul the delivery of pre-hospital emergency care services.

They are calling for better training for staff in schools and childcare facilities,plus an expanded role for paramedics to help reduce the numbers of patients attending Emergency Departments in the first instance, rather than just trying to manage the chaos we have all witnessed in our hospitals to date in 2023.

Deputy Lowry said that the figure of 134 patient deaths was based on the INMO figures.

The figures reveal over 11,000 patients were waiting on trollies for a bed last month.

When taken in tandem with a study just published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, this indicates that for every 82 people forced to wait more than six to eight hours for admittance to a hospital, there is one death above the expected mortality rate. 

Demographics in Ireland are changing and so the Regional TDs believe that healthcare needs to change as well. The recent spike in Emergency Department attendance and ongoing trolley numbers are a symptom of problems in several areas, from Community Health Services to Emergency Services, all of which seem to culminate at Emergency Department doors.

The group also says that there are delays in physically reaching the Emergency Department doors. The National Ambulance Service (NAS) has reported that they are not meeting their Emergency Response target times. In some regions these response times have increased, on average, by 10 minutes since 2019.

Overall, pressures on the NAS are growing. Nearly 2,000 calls to the service were received per day over December and January, an increase of 19% on the same period last year.

The Regional TDs in their Dáil motion, are seeking investment in terms of staff, equipment and more backup for Community Health Services. 

Many of us rely on our ambulance service in times of medical emergencies, whether it’s a heart attack or stroke in an adult or an allergic reaction or choking incident in a child. The Regional TDs want to specifically reduce the risks in such emergencies, he said.

In Ireland, almost 9,000 people die from heart disease and stroke annually, making it one of the nation’s biggest killers and there are hundreds of thousands of people living with a heart condition or the effects of a stroke. 

In children, a significant cause of death is choking and suffocation and one in 10 of these cases occur at childcare centres or schools6. There were 4,385 hospital admissions related to anaphylaxis between 2005 and 2016, with the majority occurring in young adults and children.

Any delay in accessing treatment has an impact both on survival rates for the patient and for the level of care needed in the hospital setting. For example, for every minute that elapses after a cardiac arrest, a person’s chance of survival decreases by 7-10%, and for every minute that stroke treatment is delayed, a person loses two million brain cells, highlighting the need for faster emergency medical response times, especially in the most serious of cases.

A study looking at fatalities due to anaphylaxis in early-years services suggested that the mean time in children for respiratory or cardiac arrest from the onset of symptoms was between 5 and 30 minutes and associated fatalities with a delay in administering adrenaline.

Approximately 70% of cardiac arrests happen in the home. Currently, there is just a 5% survival rate from cardiac arrest in the community. Community First Aid Responders, who are often first on the scene of a cardiac emergency, are a vital link in the chain of survival and need support, with access to medication such as adrenaline pens and aspirin and working AEDs. Figures from 2021 show that first responders defibrillated 198 patients who suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, of whom 54 survived4.