There has been a "varied" and "positive" response to a call by the Health Service Executive asking staff to work extra shifts over the Bank Holiday weekend to avoid and help reduce overcrowding levels next week, according to CEO Bernard Gloster.
He said the call was a voluntary one and was asked on the basis of people's existing terms and conditions.
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Mr Gloster said: "The call wasn't for everyone in the entire health service to turn up this weekend.
"We know typically coming into a Bank Holiday weekend that our admissions might go down about 20% but our discharges go down by about 66% and those two variables don't add up.
"The ask was for additional supports this weekend to try and reduce that. It was an ask on the basis of people's existing terms and conditions so therefore it was voluntary.
"The National Ambulance Service has certainly significant additional capacity this weekend and in some aspects of diagnostics in hospitals.
"It marks my intention to bring formal proposals to the representative organisations of all of our grades that our future recruitment would allow us the capacity to roster and deploy on a five over seven basis as opposed to five over five."
Overcrowding on Mondays and Tuesdays
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said he expected "quite a positive response" to the request and when a similar situation arose in January "healthcare workers responded very, very positively."
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, the minister said that while a lot of people are generally discharged on a Friday, "they're not discharged at the same levels on Saturdays and Sundays. And so, the emergency departments fill up, leading to overcrowding typically Mondays and Tuesdays."
He said the health service has to move away from that.
Mr Donnelly said the system is in the middle of the biggest expansion and reform of the healthcare service "in many years and probably decades."
He said that "critically", there is a new consultant contract in place which moves from rostering 40 hours a week to 80 hours a week and an extra 21,000 people have been added to the health service in the last three years.
For the other groups, including health and social care professionals, who are essential to making sure there is patient flow through the hospitals and back out of the hospitals, there is going to have to be a conversation with them about additional rostering, the minister added.
More evening and weekend rosters needed
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said healthcare staff do work across seven days and that "sometimes they get a bit offended when people imply that they don't".
He said what was needed in the health service was less of an on-call system and more of a system where people are regularly rostered on.
Speaking at the Bloom Festival in Dublin, the Taoiseach said that was the kind of discussion the Government wanted to have with all of the healthcare unions.
"We do have a 24/7 health service but there is not enough of it happening in the evenings and at weekends. That’s a shift that needs to happen."
He said additional resources in the health sector should go into more evening and weekend work.
Focus is on additional capacity at UHL
HSE chief Bernard Gloster met this morning with representatives of the Mid-West Hospital Campaign group in Limerick.
The group is seeking the restoration of emergency departments at Nenagh and Ennis general hospitals.
"I did tell them that at this point in time there certainly weren't active plans to restore blue light access into the smaller hospitals in the region, Nenagh and Ennis particularly," Mr Gloster said.
He acknowledged that University Hospital Limerick faces significant challenges in seeking to cater for a population of more than 400,000 people in the region.
"From the perspective of the HSE no one would ever definitively rule anything out to come into consideration in the future. But it’s important we don’t keep hanging with expectation either.
"Our focus right now is on additional capacity at UHL.
"The group this morning has asked me to see is there a possibility that the Local Injury Unit could be extended potentially to a 24-hour consideration.
"I think that’s a very constructive suggestion," he said.
