Potential timeline given to full 24/7 cardiac care at UHW

A possible timeline has been given to full 24/7 cardiac care at University Hospital Waterford.

The hospital’s General Manager Ben O’Sullivan confirmed the news earlier, following the announcement of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. cardiac care on the weekends.

The additional hours will be implemented on March 18th, meaning seven-day 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. cardiac care is now available at UHW.

UHW has two catheterisation laboratories, which operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. However, full 24/7 coverage has yet to be secured, and 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. is currently not covered at all.

Speaking earlier on Déise Today, General Manager Ben O’Sullivan said the additional cover is a positive step forward.

“Thankfully we’ve completed an extensive recruitment campaign in the last number of weeks, and we have the resources now in place to be able to go to a seven-day, eight-to-eight service for the Cath Lab from Tuesday, the 18th of March. The Cath Lab has grown over the last two years since September 2022, when we opened the second one, and the service that we’re offering has extended, and it’s the next step in terms of that extension of the service.

“It’s a credit really in terms of the staff on the ground who’ve been pushing for this just as much as everyone else external to the hospital, but I have to credit the teams on the ground who have been working with everybody to be as flexible as possible to make sure that we’re able to deliver the service and do it as quickly as we’ve been able to do it here since the start of this recruitment campaign.”

Practicality

The hospital is currently served by two labs, with one operating for ten hours a day, and the other operating for twelve.

Mr. O’Sullivan gave a breakdown as to the daily running of the service as it currently stands to WLR’s Damien Tiernan.

“The additional hours are going to be on Saturday and Sunday, eight-to-eight each day. That’s going to be staffed on an on-call basis so the uplifting staff will be able to maintain that.

“We recruited an additional 14.6 staff who have been added to the rotas. We’re now going to be operating as we have done since we opened the second cat lab, with two cat labs Monday through Friday, with one of them being exclusively for the diagnostics, and the second cat lab then providing the emergency on-call patient care. So we’ve now got a cat lab that will be open for any emergency that presents to the ED on a Saturday and Sunday [between the hours mentioned above] for treatment and bank holidays.”

Full 24/7 care

When asked about a possible timeline for full 24/7 cardiac care at the hospital, Ben O’Sullivan said it is a complex recruitment campaign, that will take several months.

“Practically we’d have to get approvals in terms of the funding associated with developing that service. In terms of the costs associated with going eight-to-eight on the Saturdays and Sundays, there are also considerable costs associated with going 24-7.

“We would probably need somewhere north of thirty staff to be able to provide that. The key with recruitment in healthcare professional roles is you want the best available, and when you create a new service or uplift a service like going 24-7, you’re going to be looking for a lot of staff at the same time.

“You have people graduating that will be qualifying and you’ll be looking to recruit them. You’re looking for people that are willing to move from other centers around the country or further fields, but in reality it’s going to take a long period to hire some of these specialised roles.

“It’ll be very gradual in terms of how you would you would get those roles in place. If I were looking for the number of consultants that you would need to be able to provide 24-7 service, it’s going to take us months into the year, and probably a 12-18 month time frame to be able to recruit the volume of consultants that you need to recruit.