St Luke’s Hospital is facing an “extraordinary” challenge, with just 300 beds to service almost 200,000 patients.
So says Dr Michael Conway, a cardiologist at the general hospital for Carlow and Kilkenny.
He’s calling for the bed capacity there to be increased as a matter of urgency.
He’s been telling KCLR how many people across the South East depend on the local facility;
“We as a hospital for Carlow and Kilkenny service 156,000 patients, but it could be 158,000 easily. It could even be 200,000 if you take into account the fact that we are in the middle of a whole range of counties, and people within whatever distance of the border of a county could drift into Kilkenny” he explains.
“So we have a very small amount of space to take care of patients. It’s extraordinary, in such a small hospital. We have about 300 beds on site, a lot of those though are psychiatric, paediatric, gynaecology etc. So at the heart of the hospital, is actually a very small number of beds relative to the number of people that need our help and care.”
