Letterkenny General Hospital
NEW details are emerging of the ‘night from hell’ suffered by nurses, doctors and their patients at Letterkenny General Hospital this week.
Understaffed and over-run with patients, chaos reigned.
One cancer patient spent 14 hours in hospital and another elderly patient fell out of bed. It begs the question – who is running our hospital?
Reader Loren Rea was there with her husband. Here’s her story:
BY DONEGAL DAILY READER LOREN REA
This is horrific! Here is my own little horror story. I felt like I had stepped onto the set of the ‘Walking Dead’ series when I arrived at Letterkenny A&E on Monday to collect my husband.
The whole unit was swarming & heaving with people, patients, bodies & staff . Our Hospital was completely overwhelmed. There were no beds available in the hospital, the Emergency Unit was stacked to bursting and had been since early Monday 2am, nearly to capacity as there were no beds or gurneys available.
So everyone was relegated to examination cubicles through the night with only a sheet of paper between them and the very narrow rock hard exam room table.
There had been no spare pillows or blankets; so the heat was belting and no one could get a breath. In spite of their situation I must say the Staff were Champion.
Though they could not admit him, my husband received excellent care in the circumstances. He was discharged later that day approx 10 hours later, as the doctor put it’ he had become ill at a very unlucky time’ ..
My hubby said the poor old man laying in the cubicle next to him had fallen to the floor in the night and was extremely fortunate to have avoided a serious injury.
The Unit was so hot with no fresh air coming through he could not get a breath. He needed to spend some time near entrance doors in a wheel chair.
Everyone in the A&E were working double hard, and were very busy trying to care for all the patients. but they had no where to send them! This is too sad and so needs to be on TOP of List to be sorted.
This is a great hospital but there only is so much they can do and being overwhelmed makes for serious mistakes and patients to be sent home that possibly need Medical attention or need to be under observation.
It was a situation where they were so overwhelmed they were forced to choose between the sick and the desperate.
Please we need to all come together in Donegal try to help change this.. We must all speak as one regarding all of the hospital budget cuts, and false economies. Our services are being crippled and our funding is going elsewhere. Donegal is becoming like a Third world country.
If any of these things – like Mrs Maura Porter she was lying, dying on the road in the rain for an hour,just to get transport to a hospital – or our situation in Letterkenny Hospital were to occur in Dublin there would be riots in the streets.. Please Write , visit , call your TD, HSE . SHARE THIS MESSAGE PLEASE
Loren Rea
Carndonagh