The Health Minister is calling for better weekend discharge rates at University Hospital Limerick.
It comes as front line staff at University Hospital Limerick – which serves North Tipperary – are having to care for 96 people on trolleys around the Emergency Department or elsewhere in the facility.
This accounts for nearly 20% of the 504 people who have been admitted to hospitals across the country that have been left without a bed.
Meanwhile Tipperary’s two hospitals have no patients without a bed today.
Figures from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation show both Tipperary University Hospital in Clonmel and Nenagh Hospital are among eight facilities around the country not having to care for people on trolleys.
Minister Stephen Donnelly says facilities need to show “good practice” across the board.
“If you look at the weekend discharge rate – and for me this is a very good measure of the hospitals that are running seven days a week on behalf of patients – Limerick has the second lowest weekend discharge rate of any hospital in the country.
“So it’s a good example of we need more resources and that resource is important and its beginning to work – but we also have to have good practice in all the hospitals.”
