INMO launches ‘Ward Watch’ to monitor hospital overcrowding

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has launched a new initiative called ‘Ward Watch’ today in a bid to monitor hospital overcrowding.
Ward Watch will be published on a daily basis, as well as the unions longstanding Trolley Watch which provides the numbers waiting on trolleys at each hospital, and will lead to a new combined overall measure of hospital overcrowding.
The union stated today: “The Ward Watch findings will confirm that a number of hospitals are regularly overcrowding their inpatient wards. This practice compromises the care of all patients on those wards due to an increased risk of cross infection and inadequate staffing while also minimising the dignity and privacy to these patients.
“The figures will also confirm that progress has been made, in a number of hospitals, in reducing the number of patients on trolleys. However, in others, the level of overcrowding continues leading to an overall national increase in the number of patients placed on trolleys/beds in inappropriate care environments.”
The INMO added that it remains fundamentally opposed to the placing of additional beds/trolleys, above the stated complement, on any inpatient ward/unit.
“The new Ward Watch/Trolley Watch combined measure has therefore been brought forward at the request of our members, in the frontline, who experience patients being placed in inappropriate locations on an on-going basis,” the union explained.


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