Ireland’s health infrastructure means restrictions must ease slowly - medic

Consultants ‘frightened because of our poor intensive care unit capacity, our dreadful emergency departments’

Lockdown restrictions must be eased slowly because there are not enough hospital beds to cope with a large second surge of coronavirus within months, senior doctors have warned.

Dr Laura Durcan, vice-president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA), said it was necessary to “keep the reins super tight” on reopening society because healthcare infrastructure in Ireland remains “dreadful”.

“We know that there will be a second surge,” she said.

“The European Centre for Disease Control say it is inevitable, and what we want is a small peak and not a big one.”

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Dr Durcan said consultants are “frightened because of our poor intensive care unit capacity, our dreadful emergency departments, which are not fit for purpose”.

The inability “to flex up and flex down is what is making everyone frightened and what is slowing things down” in terms of easing restrictions.

The consultant rheumatologist said less than a fifth of beds at Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, where she is based, are single-occupancy.

The majority of patients are in six-bed bays and “come the winter months those will be seven-bedded bays because we will shove a bed behind the door.”

Those calling for a quicker easing of the lockdown should be calling for increased investment in healthcare facilities “so we can be confident and strong in our response”, she said.

“This isn’t going to go away,” she said of the virus. “I’m not worried about next month, I’m worried for October, I’m worried for January.”

Dr Durcan said there is “a lot of fear” in public health decision-making “but there has to be because we don’t have the capacity to look after a huge surge in sick people”.

“I’m afraid as we head into a second wave, it will look very similar to what the first wave was. Because you can’t make capacity very fast, there is a lag time,” she told RTÉ Radio One.

She added: “We will once again stop providing care for people that isn’t Covid-related. And that massively contributes to the kind of standby mortality we see in these things, where people who have heart attacks and cancers and strokes don’t come for care and aren’t diagnosed and managed appropriately.”