The Health Service Executive's Chief Operations Officer has said a lot of the recommendations contained within an independent review of unplanned care at nine hospitals have been superseded by work done at hospitals during the pandemic.
The independent review of unplanned care at nine hospitals for the HSE covering the years 2018-2019 found that due to emergency department pressures, there was widespread placing of patients in any bed, any time, anywhere, including mixed gender.
The unpublished report was secured by the Irish Patients Association under the Freedom of Information Act.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Anne O’Connor said while emergency departments were not "perfect", a lot of work had been done in the past two years.
Asked if things had changed or if the picture painted in the report still exists, Ms O'Connor said that high trolley numbers were a symptom of the number of people coming through and the number of beds available.
"In the absence of having a lot more capacity, we will have trolleys in hospitals, and the patient experience time is a thing to watch," she said.
"I wouldn't want people to think that when patients are in EDs, they are just left there.
"We have put in a lot of extra resources during Covid, in terms of specialists, in terms of extra people going around EDs and critically specialty teams.
"What we're saying is a lot of the recommendations have been superseded by the work done during the pandemic.
"I wouldn’t say our EDs are perfect or that we don’t have a lot more work to do, we definitely do, but we have done a lot of work in the past two years".
Ms O’Connor said she herself commissioned the report in the spring of 2019, saying the previous winter was particularly bad and that the system was under pressure.
Read more: Nine hospitals did not appear to provide safe care - review
"We review all of the winters that we've had in terms of what worked and what didn’t work, the value of the investment etc, and we wanted to learn more," she said.
"The report was only completed in draft form in January, just before Covid arrived and the review team had not gone back out to the site for factual accuracy checks.
"I think for us it was about learning at the time, but the reality is, in the last two years, the operational context for our hospitals has changed beyond all recognition because of Covid and the responses to it.
"So there’s nothing really in this report that will be a surprise to people."
Citing one issue highlighted in the report, where people were being "put in beds anywhere", Ms O’Connor said that with infection prevention and control, this is not done.
"One of the issues in the report, I think there’s a reference to people being put in beds anywhere, in terms of Covid infection prevention and control, we don’t do that, so yes we have very busy ED departments, yes there is congestion, yes there are people on trolleys, however we have systems and processes in place both in terms of admitted patients and patients who are going to be discharged."
Ms O'Connor said "a lot" has changed in the past two years in terms of the environment that health staff are operating in, citing a lot of different measures that have been brought in given the requirement for infection prevention and control amid Covid-19.
She said during the surge in Covid, there was a significant reduction in numbers attending emergency departments, but added that last week nearly 29,000 people attended emergency departments, which was the highest number so far this year.
Separately, the HSE has said that Ms O'Connor will leave the organisation in June to become Managing Director of Vhi Health and Wellbeing.
