Hospital consultants have called on the new Minister for Health, Simon Harris, to urgently tackle ‘critical capacity deficits' within the Irish health service.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has written to the new Minister to outline the urgent need for investment in frontline services. It said that capacity constraints in acute hospital and mental health services are having a very negative impact on the delivery of adequate care to patients.

"International comparisons confirm that our acute services have one of the lowest numbers of practising doctors, a relatively low number of acute hospital beds and an excessively high bed occupancy rate.

"In recent years, Ireland has suffered a damaging medical brain drain which has resulted in hundreds of approved hospital consultant posts remaining vacant or, at best, being filled on a temporary or agency basis," commented IHCA president, Dr Gerard Crotty.

He said that these factors are ‘undermining the provision of care to patients', and immediate investment is needed.

Meanwhile, the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine (IAEM), which represents doctors working in Emergency Departments (EDs), has called on the new Minister to tackle the country's trolley crisis, ‘which has been with us since 1997'.

It described the commitments on this issue in the new Programme for Government as ‘rather minimalist' and ‘a step backwards rather than forwards'.

The IAEM noted that in 2012, the then-Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly, committed the Government of the day to a standard that would see 95% of patients seen and either discharged or admitted to a hospital bed within six hours. All patients were to be seen and discharged/admited within nine hours.

"An anaemic statement in the new Programme for Government commits the Government to increasing the number seen and discharged within the six-hour timeframe from the current 68% to 93% by 2021. This represents a significant and unacceptable watering down of the current standard," the association insisted.

It added that a ‘feeble commitment' to carry out a review of national bed capacity ‘will provide little comfort to the 9,000 or so patients who languish on hospital trolleys each month in Ireland's EDs, or those who have their elective procedures cancelled due to this self-evident capacity problem'.