In less than 24 hours, we developed a 3-hour curriculum that included cardiac, pulmonary, and renal pathophysiology; care paradigms; and therapies and procedures anticipated for use when managing patients with COVID-19.
A total of 413 nurses completed training within 10 days
As the institution mobilized, expanding nursing resources became a priority. To fulfill new ICU requirements, we needed almost double the 358 full-time-equivalent nurses in the standard table of organization to ensure that we could maintain nurse to patient ratios. Thus nurses who do not typically manage critical illnesses were redeployed to supplement ICU staffing.
Was this too complicated for the HSE? I don’t know, I have read they made some attempts at it but apparently we only have 350 odd critical beds now with all talk that ventilators are not being used as much generally with Covid care, relieving some of the strain on services.
As Michael McDowell said the other day,
When the March lockdown began, planning was done to augment Ireland’s hospital capacity. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, minister for health Simon Harris and HSE CEO Paul Reid held a press conference on April 1st in a huge auditorium at the Citywest hotel complex. Posing with newly-installed beds, they announced 450 stepdown beds in the arena and 1,000 further isolation beds in the hotel complex. They said they planned similar facilities at eight other centres in the country.
“So in total being able to add over 2,000, nearly 3,000, beds, to our health service capacity…that’s in addition to the 2,000 that we managed to secure from the private hospitals,” the then taoiseach said.
Harris added that the country’s health service would effectively grow by 5,000 beds.
Both stated they expected “very significant pressure” on hospitals in the following weeks. Does that sound familiar this week? Patients were cleared out of acute hospitals, and in many cases sent untested to nursing homes at that time.
What happened to the 3,000 extra public sector beds? What happened to the eight regional centres?
Was the Government then doing what the World Health Organisation later appealed to all governments to do – to use lockdowns as the last resort and as a temporary time-buying step to reorganise and strengthen their health systems’ resources?
Or did these centres and extra beds evaporate when the surge in hospital admissions predicted by Nphet failed to materialise?
