The Health Information and Quality Authority has published its report following an unannounced inspection at University Hospital Limerick.
The hospital – which serves North Tipp, Limerick and Clare – is consistently the most overcrowded in the country.
Inspectors from HIQA conducted the risk-based inspection at UHL over the space of two days last February.
The Dooradoyle hospital has 530 inpatient beds and 149 day-case beds and serves a population of around 400,000 people in the Midwest region.
According to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation frontline staff at UHL have to deal with major overcrowding on a daily basis. Last month alone frontline staff had to care for 1,857 patients on trolleys.
In the emergency department, HIQA found the hospital to be partially compliant with three national standards and non-compliant with one.
This represented some improvement on the authorities findings in 2022, where three of the four standards assessed were found to be non-compliant, with the remainder found to be partially compliant.
Findings from the inspection for areas in the hospital other than the emergency department were more positive, with eight out of 11 national standards assessed found to be either compliant or substantially compliant.
HIQA inspectors spoke to patients in the hospital during their visit – patient experience times and the time spent waiting for tests were raised by some in the emergency department as areas of great frustration. One patient described how they waited for four days for an MRI scan and seven days for an EEG.
However all patients were very complimentary about the staff describing them as ‘very attentive’, ‘kind and caring’ and ‘doing their best’.
The hospital is in the process of building or planning the development of two additional 96-bed blocks to add significant extra inpatient bed capacity. The first of these blocks is intended to be opened in late 2024 or early 2025, with the second intended to open in 2027.
