Additional funding of €74 million is being made available by the Government to tackle the ongoing issue of overcrowding in the country's Emergency Departments (EDs), the Health Minister has confirmed.

Some €44 million is being allocated to the Fair Deal scheme, to help alleviate the problem of delayed discharges.

This scheme provides financial support for nursing home accommodation, however several hundred people are currently on the Fair Deal waiting list and waiting times are around 11 weeks.

Many of these people have to remain in hospital despite the acute part of their care being complete, and these delayed discharges are a big contributor to the current overcrowding problem.

According to Minister Varadkar, the €44 million will provide an additional 1,600 places on the scheme and reduce the waiting time for approval from 11 weeks to four weeks.

Meanwhile, a further €30 million will be spent on additional transitional care beds - these are temporary contract beds - until June, as well as additional community, convalescence and district hospital beds on a permanent basis.

This will ‘facilitate more rapid discharge from hospital', the Department of Health said.

The funding decision was made based on recommendations in the Emergency Department Task Force Action Plan, which has just been published.

The Task Force was convened last December after the number of patients left waiting on trolleys continued to rise during the busy winter months. During the first week of January, the number of patients on trolleys broke the 600 barrier for the first time.

"Overcrowding in our hospitals has eased since January and is trending downwards. But it remains higher than at this point last year. Similarly the number of delayed discharges has fallen from a peak of 850 but remains over 700.

"For these reasons, it is necessary to take additional action to provide more nursing home placements to free up acute hospital beds and make more community, convalescence and district hospital beds available. The implementation of these measures has now begun, but will take about eight weeks to fully implement," explained Minister Varadkar.

He insisted that taken together, these measures would have ‘a noticeable and measurable impact on trolleys, overcrowding and delayed discharges'. However, he acknowledged that they would not ‘resolve all problems in all sites'.

"That is not solely a matter of resources and is very much linked to process, management, efficiency and patient flow. This will require further attention. With this extra money we can do the expensive part by creating more capacity across the board. The next part is much less expensive, but much harder to achieve as it involves better use of existing resources in the main," he commented.

He added that ‘reform of practices and processes' must happen.

The funding was welcomed by the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA), however it warned that proposals in the Task Force Action Plan 'do not go far enough'.

According to IHCA president, Dr Gerard Crotty, based on international comparisons, acute hospitals in Ireland have a low number of beds, consultants and doctors on a per capita basis.

"The targets in the Action Plan are not sufficient to address either the delays in admitting patients to acute hospitals or the number of patients that are on waiting lists for essential surgery and other procedures...If it is intended to achieve real and meaningful change, then more aggressive targets are required with the appropriate resources to provide sufficient capacity," Dr Crotty commented.