Hospital Transfers
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

My apologies for the mix-up, whatever the source. I will get the Deputy a full and more official answer. Nevertheless, I will speak from my own experience.
The focus on delayed transfers of care is an integral part of the focus on trolleys - the whole thing goes together. What we are really talking about is patient flow. Hospitals that experience ongoing delayed transfer of care, DTOC, problems include Letterkenny University Hospital, for example, where the number was in the 40s, but is now down in the 30s and moving towards 25. Directly across the road, there is a 100-bed community nursing unit that will open in 2026 and take some of the pressure off.
It is also about the management of this. For example, in Galway, we have gone through a deliberate reset. This speaks to the Deputy's example. The last week in Galway hospital was not good. It lost some of its private capacity for egress or transferring out of the hospital, and because that happened, the trolley numbers built up, and it has had seven very poor days. In the previous 25 days, it had only two red days, 22 green days and one amber day. In the 25 days before that, that was essentially inverted, and it was all red and maybe one green. Patient flow matters, and it matters all the time. It matters because of the impact on people in emergency departments, but it also matters to the hospital's ability to bring in inpatient day cases. As the Deputy highlighted, the use of surge means hospitals cannot do endoscopy investigations and so on. They cannot bring in non-time-critical electives. Of course, they bring in time-critical electives like cancer surgery, but not non-time-critical electives.
That is why the focus on urgent and emergency care, UEC, is important. It is a complete piece. There is no point in focusing on UEC without making sure they have a full awareness of what is available in the nursing homes. University Hospital Waterford does that particularly well. It has visibility in its patient control room of all of the passages out of the hospital. There are others that could do it dramatically better, such as Letterkenny University Hospital, and many of those have a DTOC problem, except for St. James's Hospital, which is a weird one that I will come back to.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21