Patients wait up to 36 hours for hospital beds

Patients attending one of Northern Ireland's busiest emergency departments have been forced to wait almost a day and a half for hospital beds.

We reveal the figures as we launch a special series of interviews taking an in-depth look at our crisis-hit health service.

As part of the first day of coverage our reporter Tara McLaughlin spent an evening in the busy emergency department at the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald.

There were almost 100 patients waiting in the reception area and trolleys lined the corridors while staff worked to make beds available in wards.

Roisin Devlin is the interim clinical manager for unscheduled care in the South Eastern Trust.

She told us about the daily pressures she faces:

"It's worrying that we've seen such a peak in attendances and it's important that people understand that if there are long waits in the emergency department it's because we've got a lot of ill people who are waiting on beds on the ward.

"Working within the emergency department and within unscheduled care is challenging enough obviously because at times we see people on the worst day of their lives.

"When you've that coupled with people waiting excessively for beds, that can really add to the stress of a nurses day."

She told us health workers do all they can to facilitate a timely discharge or transfer patients to a ward but there is often a shortage of beds:

"We are quite fast in seeing patients within what we call the four-hour target so once you arrive you are seen within a timely fashion.

"The problem is moving on in the next step of the journey, so moving up onto a ward and we have had patients here for 24/36 hours at times waiting on beds."

And she said while it's not ideal, patients will always be made as comfortable as possible:

"Any of the patient's care would be started and carried out within the emergency department so they would be seen either by the medical or the surgical consultant and all their interventions would be started.

"However, to stay on a hospital bed in behind a cubicle, that's not what we would want for any of our patients.

"An emergency department was never set up like a ward and we function 24/7 so if you're an ill person what you need is quiet but when you're in an area that has lights on... buzzers and bells going all day, that has phones ringing, that isn't the environment for anybody."

And the leading unscheduled care nurse here has also warned of a worrying rise in cancer diagnoses in ED departments which she attributes to long waiting lists in Northern Ireland.

"With the increase in waiting times patients maybe aren't getting scans done in a timely fashion so then they become unwell and they present to the emergency department and that's where their diagnosis is given.

"If we were breaking bad news to anybody we would try to get them onto a ward to try to do that in the best environment possible but that's not always possible."

Ongoing industrial action and the upcoming nurses strike is compounding the pressures faced in emergency medicine.

Health staff have been participating in work-to-rule for a number of weeks, with a 12-hour walk out planned for Wednesday.