A former Cork Emergency Medicine consultant with 35 years experience says it’s time that local politicians and hospital CEOs are held accountable for the current overcrowding crisis in Irish hospitals.
Dr Chris Luke is warning that front line staff are "broken and angry" due to what he described as an unfair system that puts them under immense pressure and says the state of hospital emergency departments is one of the most important measures for how the country is progressing as a society.
The Emergency Department at Cork University Hospital is consistently one of the most overcrowded in the country, with the Irish and Nurses Midwives Organisation previously describing the overcrowding at the hospital over the past year as "frightening" and "dangerous".
Speaking to RedFM News, Dr Chris Luke says strong leadership is needed from local politicians and hospital management to ease the crisis in emergency departments across Ireland.
"We need to ask both of those people the next time you write to them, or you meet them, 'excuse me, Mr. TD, or excuse me, Miss CEO when were you last in your emergency department?'
"If the ED is constantly in the press because it is quote unquote, overwhelmed, and the conditions are quote unquote, like a war zone. I think that the captain of the ship, or the general needs to be leading from the front, and I cannot see how any solution for our crisis in our emergency departments will ever work unless the chief executives the medical director, the director of nursing, is in the emergency department every single day for as long as it is described as overwhelmed, and the same applies to the TDs"
