Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said he is sending a HSE national support team to both Galway University Hospital and Cork University hospital to help improve capacity.
Capacity issues have emerged in recent weeks following heavy presentation numbers at each hospital's emergency department.
Mr Donnelly was attending a formal sod turning ceremony to mark the start of construction of the new €90 million 96-bed unit at University Hospital Limerick, which is designed to ease capacity issues there.
It will however take another two years before the block is completed and equipped.
UHL staff have been working with the HSE national support team in recent months to improve patient flow in the hospital, to better integrate care pathways into community settings, and to avoid hospital admissions, especially for older people.
They have also significantly reduced the average length of stay for patients to just below five days and reduced the number of patients who had been in hospital for 14 days or more.
Transfers and discharges to other hospitals are now happening earlier in the day.
Next Monday a new care unit, an Older Persons Assessment Centre, will open beside the emergency department at Limerick, which is dedicated to the care of people aged 75 and over.
It will have a staff of 25, including two ED consultants, with the intention of avoiding admission to hospital if at all possible.
Mr Donnelly said there had been significant improvements in Limerick, and he was now sending this team to both Galway and Cork to try and improve patient flows there.
In the past 15 days both Cork and Galway hospitals have experienced significant overcrowding and have been top of the INMO’s trolley watch lists.
Mr Donnelly said he wanted to see if the team could bring about similar improvements there.
One of three HIQA reports published today
Director of Healthcare with HIQA Sean Egan has said that waiting times from when a patient has completed treatment in the Emergency Department to their actual admission varied from two to 58 hours.
This is one of the findings in a new HIQA report, one of three published today.
Speaking to RTÉ's Drivetime, Mr Egan said that it is an "extremely long period of time for anyone to wait in an Emergency Department".
Inspections were carried out in June and July 2022 at Cork University Hospital, St. Columcille's Hospital and Cavan and Monaghan Hospital.
Mr Egan said: "Throughout the inspections we found some good practice and also areas for improvement.
"We've been engaging with all of the hospitals, including Cork University Hospital, to address the specific issues that we have identified.
"Each has produced a compliance plan and we are following up with them to ensure that those plans are implemented."
INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said that since HIQA carried out its inspection at CUH, 4,469 patients have been on trolleys.
"The overall message here is that our hospital capacity is not sufficient," she said.
Speaking on the same programme, she said: "The team that the minister is sending in must be supported to make very serious decisions.
"It is not an option to say 'we don't have enough beds, we're going to continue to provide unsafe care and care that is actually going to be harmful for people'.
"It is just not an option."
