WATCH: Health minister ‘very concerned’ about report into death of Clare man found on floor of UHL

HEALTH Minister Stephen Donnelly has acknowledged there was a ‘series of failures’ in the case of a 65-year-old man who may have been laying dead on the floor of the emergency department of University Hospital Limerick for possibly over an hour before he was discovered.

Martin Abbott had spent three days on a trolley at UHL and was found lying face-down on the floor beside his trolley in a cubicle in the early hours of the morning on December 17, 2019.

Speaking to the press at UHL this Thursday afternoon, April 4, Minister Donnelly said that he was ‘very concerned’ by the report into Mr Abbott’s death.

“The report also called out the fact that solutions to overcrowding which have worked in other hospitals have yet to be seen here,” Mr Donnelly said.

During his visit to UHL, the minister met with representative groups of nursing staff and non-consultant hospital doctors, stating that he impressed on them that those hospitals that perform best in terms of trollies are those which have changed the way they work to better suit the needs of the populations they serve.

According to Mr Donnelly, measures to combat overcrowding have proven successful when deployed in Waterford, Mullingar, Beaumont and elsewhere, something which has yet to be seen at UHL.

“What happened was not acceptable,” he said in relation to Mr Abbott’s death.

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Also commenting on the report into the death Mr Abbott, and reports on other patients who have died at the emergency department at UHL, the chief executive of the HSE, Bernard Gloster, said that in respect of “any families that have been the subject of such reports, we would want to repeatedly say, publicly and privately, that we would never want those outcomes.”

He apologised for the negative experiences at UHL experienced by so many.

“Sometimes even with that sorry, we can’t take away all of that pain, but what we can do is continue to make improvements and I think we can be humble enough to learn from the shortcomings that we’ve had,” continued Mr Gloster who hails from Kildimo.

The HSE chief would not be drawn into any detail on the upcoming inquest into the death of 16-year-old Aoife Johnston, who died from bacterial meningitis at UHL December 2022 following a 12-hour wait in the ED.

Mr Gloster said he was conscious that the date of the inquest is nearing, but that he would “rather leave that to both the family and the jurisdiction of the coroner.”