A full return of planned services at University Hospital Limerick and hospitals across the Midwest will take weeks to complete, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said.
It follows the deferral last week of inpatient, day surgery, outpatient appointments and some other scheduled services at UHL, Ennis, Nenagh, St John's and Croom Orthopaedic Hospital, until further notice.
"There will be a phased recommencement of those services," Mr Donnelly said.
"I expect that phasing to begin in about a week and I expect a full re-phasing to take a short number of weeks."
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Mr Donnelly said the deferrals are a "planned patient safety measure" in order for new working practices to be implemented.
He added that it was a recommendation of an expert group tasked with addressing the Emergency Department and patient flow at UHL in the wake of the death of Aoife Johnston in the hospital’s ED.
The 16-year-old died from meningitis on 19 December 2022 after presenting with suspected sepsis two days earlier, but faced a lengthy wait for treatment.
Earlier this year an inquest into her death returned a verdict of medical misadventure.
"We sent in an expert group earlier on this year to look not just at the ED in UHL but to look at the full patient flow through the hospital. It’s a pretty stark report. It acknowledges that there’s capacity issues - we fully accept that - which is why we’re putting in so much capacity," the minister said.
"But the report is very clear that there are standard approaches to patient flow in hospitals that we know work well in other hospitals that we are yet to see fully implemented in UHL."
Mr Donnelly said the review was conducted by Grace Rothwell who is the manager of University Hospital Waterford, the chief nurse in Waterford, and Dr Fergal Hickey who is a former consultant in emergency medicine in Sligo University Hospital.
"They did a very thorough report on what is working and what’s not working," he said.
"One of the recommendations in that report said: 'the ED needs to be freed up. There’s a lot of patients in the system and if they can free up those beds, if they can get the flow going and while they’re getting the flow going, if they implement the new, better, working practices then we can begin to see things improve’.
"What we’re doing in these few weeks it was planned, it was advised by the expert group, and it is a patient safety measure," Mr Donnelly said.
He added that he would like to see Justice Frank Clarke’s report into the circumstances of the death of Aoife Johnston to be published or "a publishable version of it" to be published.
Last week, HSE Chief Executive Bernard Gloster said the the suspension of some medical services in the midwest was part of short-term interventions to improve care in the longer term.
Mr Gloster said a decision was made in April and May to deploy an expert team to the UHL Group to get an insight into the situation there.
Mr Gloster said that as part of that review it was decided that at some time during the summer, services would concentrate on urgent care or those patients currently in the system.
He said that essentially the hospital is "completely overheated".
