EMERGENCY care pressures in Northern Ireland will continue to cause more unnecessary deaths in the coming months, a senior medic has warned.
Emergency consultant Dr Paul Kerr is based at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital and is vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) in Northern Ireland.
Speaking to the Irish News, he said the health service had experienced its worst winter on record and that he expects the situation to get worse before spring.
It follows concerns raised by his RCEM colleagues in England, who estimated as many as 500 extra deaths were happening a week because of delays in emergency care.
Official figures from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, show that in the week up to December 23 a total of 411 deaths were registered.
This compares to 347 in the same week in 2021 and a five-year average figure of 280, between 2020-21.
Dr Kerr said that while it was hard to suggest an exact number, it was clear that more people were losing their lives because of emergency delays.
“It’s fair to say that lives are being lost. It’s difficult to look into that data and give you the explanation for each of those," he said.
“But it’s not hard to believe that some of those are associated with the wait in Emergency Departments and some are associated with waits in other parts of the system.
“So you can imagine when there’s 400 people waiting for a bed in our emergency departments, as there is now, that treatment is not going to be optimal."
Describing conditions in emergency rooms in recent months, he said: “The crowding is dreadful. It’s not fair to patients to have them lying on trolleys for perhaps three or four days which unfortunately is happening in some departments in our region at the moment.
“We are amongst the worst performing regions in the NHS, of course you know that’s not a new situation."
With the current problems pre-dating the pandemic, he said "the big exacerbating" factor remained the difficulty in discharging medically fit hospital patients into appropriate community care.
He said winter pressures would continue for some months and were "significantly worse" than ever before.
“That is very hard on staff, it’s dreadful to come in and see staff distressed or perhaps wanting to leave the NHS because they’ve had such a difficult time," he said.
“We talk about moral injury, it’s not a cliché. We do meet people that are not getting the care they need, naturally staff are distressed by this.
“They’re there to help people and they’re unable to do it. They walk into work and we see dozens of elderly patients lying on trolleys, unable to get pain relief sometimes, unable to get the treatment they need in time and even unable to get to the toilet.
“So it’s very distressing and staff are leaving.”
