AT THE age of 101, the elderly woman who was left on a trolley in the emergency department at University Hospital Limerick for 25 hours has lived through the 1916 rising, two world wars, and no doubt seen her fair share of illness and life’s ups and downs.
Having paid her taxes and charges her whole life and dedicated years to looking after a family, it’s not asking too much to expect to be looked after when she falls ill in her later years.
At such an advanced age, she is presumably quite frail and vulnerable and needs a little extra care.
In a developed country with a supposedly advanced healthcare system, patients do not expect to be left waiting five hours for an ambulance.
They do not expect to see a queue of 11 ambulances waiting outside the hospital for up to three hours as there is nowhere to put the patients.
And, at 101 years old, they expect to be treated with a little dignity, not left on a trolley in a busy hospital with little or no privacy or comfort for an entire day, which is just what happened to an elderly Clare woman in University Hospital Limerick this week.
Not only that, but the granddaughter of an 81-year-old woman also contacted the Limerick Post this week revealing that her grandmother, who also waited on a trolley for 24 hours, was left sitting on a commode for two hours. She was then put in adult nappies as the hospital didn’t have sufficient staff to help her use the toilet.
The nurses themselves were so upset and frustrated over the conditions in the UHL emergency department last week that one of them even urged the woman’s granddaughter to contact the press to help highlight the issue.
The HSE apologised for the delays experienced by patients last week, but apologies are only words, words that we have heard time and time again in recent years, and they mean nothing if they are not followed up with actions that will prevent these situations from happening again.
