Pandemic highlights Beaumont Hospital’s want for main capital funding

The hospital needs investments in the emergency room, additional beds and an integrated solution for patient care

Ian Carter, CEO of the RCSI Hospital Group

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a major test of the human and operational resources of Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and again underscores the continuing need for capital investment.

CEO Gillian Harford underlined this picture in the hospital's latest annual report.

Investments in Emergency Services (ED), additional bed capacity and an integrated solution for patient care in the hospital environment and community systems were required.

She said the impact of the pandemic has also increased the need to increase rather than decrease the allocation of resources in order to maintain and, if possible, increase the allocation of labor to support these needs.

The hospital's CEO, Ian Carter, outlined the key challenges for 2020 in his report, including ED, which were generally not fit for purpose in terms of both design and overall capacity. This made the timely advancement of the necessary clinical pathways particularly problematic, especially for patients who do not require admission.

This problem has been exacerbated by the current bed configuration of “six-bed bays” and the particularly limited number of single rooms required for isolation. The increasing urgency of surgical admission / tertiary transfers, requiring complex surgery, routinely exceeded the existing capacity of intensive care.

This had been reduced due to the introduction of an eight-bed, high-addiction facility, but treatment delays remained and less than optimal post-operative accommodation / existing outpatient clinic / limitations in outpatient infrastructure capacity.

According to the annual report, it was of great concern to the ED directorate that the number of patients who did not wait for a medical exam had increased in 2019.

The critical care capacity was insufficient to meet demand from both medical and complex and national surgical presentations.

The existing acute bed complement was insufficient to accommodate both emergency and elective patient cohorts, which led to less than optimal waiting times, as the hospital was consistently more than 97 percent busy.

Beaumont Hospital had made significant progress in joint on-site operations across the RCSI Hospital Group, particularly in certain surgical specialties. This shared insourcing approach needed to be further developed in 2020 in order to fully utilize all of the Hospital Group's clinical capabilities, Carter added in his report.

Similarly, there was a parallel requirement to improve both hospital and community integration in terms of clinical pathways that maintain residence, avoid acute admission, and shorten the duration of acute stay, especially for patients with chronic illness.

In this context, there was clearly a need to remove existing barriers to the seamless transfer of patients in need of rehabilitation, recovery, rest and nursing home accommodation from the acute hospital environment.

This would require the further development of existing successful “outreach” services in each of these corporate areas and a direct renaming of the existing service provision on the campus of Beaumont Hospital Raheny.

Overall, Beaumont Hospital has successfully implemented all agreements with the Health Service Executive regarding service delivery, development, quality, human resources and financial performance for 2019, the report added. • •

valerie.ryan@imt.ie

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