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Five years ago, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) warned that ‘chronic understaffing’, combined with serious overcrowding in hospitals, posed a ‘grave risk’ to patient safety, with over 11,450 people left on hospital trolleys in October 2019.

While there have been some improvements in the past five years, trolley numbers, a key indicator for overcrowding in hospitals, have not improved significantly, and understaffing of nurses and midwives remains a serious problem.

October 2023 saw 10,538 patients without a bed, while most recent figures from September 2024, typically a less busy month than October, recorded over 9,635 patients on trolleys.

There is currently a HSE recruitment moratorium in place, which the INMO say is having a serious impact on staffing across the public health service. Nurses and midwives in the public service will be balloted from 14^th October 2024 over this issue of understaffing.

INMO deputy general secretary Dr Edwards Mathews said of the current situation:

“We are now heading into the hardest period of the year without enough staff to safely care for patients, and the number of people who will be treated on trolleys will continue to grow over the coming months. 

Additional bed capacity must be prioritised and all obstacles to recruiting nurses and midwives need to be removed urgently. Continuing to obstruct safe staffing in this way is simply irresponsible, and will without a doubt lead to worse outcomes for patients this winter.”

Elaine Hickey, Head of Medical Negligence at Tracey Solicitors LLP, agrees with Dr Mathews. She says a major side-effect of the continued under-staffing and overcrowding in Irish hospitals is that medical professionals are stretched beyond their capacity, increasing the chance of mistakes happening.

“Understaffing has been the norm in Irish hospitals for a number of years now, which really is unacceptable in this day and age. We’re seeing patients being injured as a result of this, particularly in what we call ‘never events’ – that is, medical situations that should never occur,” she says.

Examples of never events include improper drug administration, misplaced naso-gastric tubes, or surgical instrument or swabs left inside a patient’s body after surgery.

“I am currently dealing with several cases of people who have had swabs left inside them after surgery. The hospitals say this is a really rare occurrence, but that’s not what we are seeing. This shouldn’t happen. There are count-in and count-out systems to prevent this, but sometimes staff are under so much pressure, these procedures aren’t followed, and people become injured as a result.”

“It’s dreadful for any patient to experience a never event. But it’s also unfair on the medical staff who are so stretched they’re more likely to make a mistake; which no one wants,” says Elaine.

“We must use the law to continue to seek justice for people who have been injured through mistakes that happen as a result of this under-staffing.”

“The law can be a powerful tool to influence change: it holds hospital management and the government to account. We’ve seen it with some of our own medical negligence cases, where a new hospital procedure is put in place following the settlement of a case, to make sure that what happened to our client, doesn’t happen to anyone else ever again,” she says.

If you believe that you have suffered because of medical negligence, you may be entitled to compensation for your injuries or illness, and to seek a form of justice for what happened.

To find out more, contact us and tell our specialist medical negligence claims solicitors about your case.