HSE Says Having Staff Available To Provide Critical Care Is A Major Challenge
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The Health Service Executive says having the staff, if needed, is their main major challenge at the moment.
463 patients with Covid-19 are in hospitals across the country, with 90 being treated in ICU.
The HSE’s chief clinical officer says space, and being able to provide ventilators isn’t the problem they face IF there is a surge in ICU patients.
Dr Colm Henry says it’s having enough staff available to provide critical care:
“Our critical care programme in our hospitals, it trained people at short notice during those surge times, particularly in January of last year, where we redeployed staff who had had training to provide critical care. But the critical isn’t the ventilators, we have those, isn’t the spaces we can redesignate existing spaces. It’s having people to provide care to guarantee good, the best possible outcome. And that’s our major challenge, certainly at this point in time.”
