Each day, the Health Service Executive and the Irish Nurses & Midwives Organisation publish separate figures on overcrowding and the number of patients on a trolley waiting for admission to a bed.So which figures are correct, or are some figures more accurate than others?This HSE says its figures include patients who are on a hospital trolley or extra bed placed in an inappropriate space in a hospital ward.
It is important to be aware that the trolley numbers count 'admitted patients', rather than patients waiting to be seen or triaged. On the day of the record number recorded, Tuesday 3 January last, the INMO put the figure at 931 patients waiting. The HSE figure was 772. These patients may be treated on trolleys in corridors, on chairs, in waiting rooms, or simply where there is space.
TrolleyGAR reports the numbers of patients awaiting admission whose wait time exceeds nine hours and 24 hours.The HSE told RTÉ News that the system enables the hospitals' system performance and helps trigger the hospitals' response during busy periods. "It provides timely information on demand, and supports the use of timely, meaningful and robust data, to enable proactive responses to periods of additional 'surge' capacity in the system," the HSE added.Essentially both figures are a reflection of the HSE or the INMO’s system of calculation.So you could say they are both correct, but different.