The mother of a nine-month-old baby has been talking about her experience of attending the Emergency Department at Cork University Hospital, where her daughter was treated on the floor because there was no trolley available for her.
Emmeline O'Riordan was suffering multiple seizures when she attended the hospital.
Her parents say Emmeline's treatment while she waited to be admitted to the hospital's children's ward left them feeling helpless.
She began to suffer seizures before Christmas.
On 17 February, following another seizure, her mother Rebecca was told at her out-of-hours GP service to bring her to the Emergency Department at CUH.
Rebecca said the department was overcrowded when she arrived there close to midnight, and was told there was no trolley for Emmeline.
She said Emmeline suffered multiple seizures in her arms as she sat on a chair waiting to be seen by a doctor, and that her daughter was placed on a blanket on the floor so that suppositories could be administered to reduce her temperature.
She said the nurse apologised for having to treat Emmeline in those conditions.
"It is not suitable at all," Rebecca said.
"It is absolutely insane to expect a small baby or anybody with a small baby to manage in those conditions.
"But, from an infection control perspective, there is none. There is absolutely no infection control. There is no isolation for young people; there is no isolation for the elderly."
Emmeline's father, Ger, said they were fearful for her. "There was so much that could have gone wrong, and we were extremely worried about her. She is having seizures - she is tiny."
The O'Riordan's praised staff working in the Emergency Department and also complimented the quality of care Emmeline received once she was admitted to the children's ward the following morning.
"I felt guilty because I couldn't do anything for her," Rebecca said.
"I was doing everything that I could, and I know the nurses felt the same, because the nurse who gave her the suppository had said 'I'm so sorry this is absolutely barbaric', and she used the word barbaric, and she said 'I can't deal with this, I can't deal with this'."
The couple say they felt they had to lodge a complaint with hospital management over the conditions in the Emergency Department prior to Emmeline's admission, because that was the right thing to do and change would not happen if nobody complained.
They also said they wanted to set the right example for their children.
"I suppose from a pure dignity perspective, they (hospital management) need to know what happened and they need to understand how it feels as a mother to be sitting there with your baby and they are having these seizures and you have no idea why," Rebecca said.
She added: "It's not like you can get up and give out to everybody because who are you giving out to? There is nobody to give out to. Everybody around you is doing everything that they can."
A spokesman for Cork University Hospital said he could not comment on individual cases, but he pointed to a statement released in relation to overcrowding at the Emergency Department in recent days, which appeals to patients to consider all care options.
At the time of Emmeline's admission on 18 February, Cork University Hospital was experiencing significant overcrowding.
According to figures from the INMO, it was the second most overcrowded hospital in the country after Limerick, with 65 patients on trolleys waiting for beds.
CUH had the second-highest number of patients on trolleys waiting for beds today when the INMO took its figures at 8am - there were 44 patients on trolleys in the hospital's emergency department and 12 on trolleys elsewhere in the hospital.
There were 73 patients on trolleys in University Hospital Limerick and, nationally, there were 467 patients on trolleys at 8am today. That figure, while lower than average, is regarded as high for a Friday.
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