The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has warned that continuing pressures of overcrowding and understaffing are causing deaths and poor outcomes in the health service.
Members of the IMO will gather in Killarney for the annual general meeting today, with Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly due to address the conference on Saturday.
IMO President Dr John Cannon has said it is inappropriate to be taking care of people in hallways on trolleys and in inadequate facilities. As a result, avoidable deaths will happen, he said.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said: "Every medical body in the world will say that when you run your hospital over capacity and when you don't have appropriate places to treat and care for patients, you will inevitably have poor outcomes and unfortunately in extreme circumstances, some of those poor outcomes actually include fatalities and deaths.
"We really need a generational level of investment to put capacity and to put redundancy back into the system," Dr Cannon said.
He said that unavoidable deaths occur due to a failure to move people into appropriate settings.
"The issue and the blame certainly doesn't lie at the foot of emergency departments.
"It's the ability for those patients, once they're triaged and treated, to be moved into an appropriate settings, onto appropriate wards, and that's where the issue comes.
He said Ireland has about 2.9 hospital beds per thousand population, with the EU average being approximately 4.7 beds per thousand.
Ireland's occupancy rate is about 90% but the EU average is 70-75%, he explained.
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In relation to general practice, Dr Cannon said people are now having to wait on average two to three weeks for a regular doctor’s appointment.
He called for the minster to invest in the health service "to reflect demand, not to reflect fiscal policy".
"Firstly, and we are investing, but it's not enough to keep up with the growth of the population or the growth of demand for health service. So, the first thing we need is we need a generational level of investment.
"We need to fast-track new beds being brought online and I would say that we need somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 new beds.
"We need a root and branch review of recruitment because it is a competitive market for staff.
"We're losing staff to other countries in the world, so we need to look at how we recruit and how we retain our staff and certainly we need to start doing exit interviews for people that are leaving the system."
In relation to the new public-only hospital consultant contract, Dr Cannon said the IMO is willing to re-engage in discussions.
"The money is not the issue, about 57% of consultants that we balloted said they wouldn't take this new contract," he said.
"We thought this was an opportunity to offer something that consultants really wanted and the issue was around the maximum number of weekends and late nights that consultants could be asked to work.
"We could have gotten a really attractive contract here, but unfortunately we didn’t get there."
Delivering safe care becoming increasingly difficult - INMO
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has said that an increasing number of children are stuck on trolleys waiting for admission to hospital.
General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said: "There's very little discharge and very little movement."
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Philip Boucher-Hayes, Ms Ní Sheaghdha said that delivering safe care is becoming increasingly difficult.
Meanwhile, she described the removal of the mandatory mask mandate in hospitals next week as "absolutely the wrong move right now".
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said that many people are getting Covid-19 and other transmissible diseases and conditions in hospitals because of overcrowding.
It would be fine to make this kind of decision if we had a perfect hospital system, she said, but this is not the case.
"If you had a perfect hospital system that had single rooms and everybody was being cared for in isolation - that's fine to make these types of infection prevention and control announcements.
"But when you have an overcrowded environment with overcrowded wards, overcrowded EDs - this is absolutely the wrong move right now."
The INMO has written to the Health Service Executive about the decision, Ms Ní Sheaghdha added.
