Professor Mick Malloy

And the UK system, I'm not aware of it.

I haven't worked in that element in the UK system.

And that you're saying about it cutting the time for urgent patients, I'm not clear on that because the article I read from your researcher talked about cutting the waiting time.

for those who had the long waits, which were the lower priority cases.

And it was referenced to another article which talked about inappropriate deaths or unexpected deaths because people were waiting long times, which was a different issue.

That's the tricky part.

And that really is a public opinion matter.

I know in some emergency departments that does happen right now.

So particularly where you've got minor injury services in a hospital which are front loaded to be operating maximally during the daytime and somebody may present at midnight or 1am and be told, listen, you could wait here all night.

And you will be seen by that group of people when they start work at 8 o'clock in the morning because overnight there are larger volumes of people with very serious conditions and less staff around.

So you will still wait for that seven hours or you could go home, go to sleep, come back at 8 o'clock in the morning and be seen by that person or that service at 8 a.m.

with a minimal wait time.

Those systems already operate in some hospitals quite effectively.

Now, the difficulty with the hospitals is at the moment in Ireland, we can't complete the circle with somebody who should maybe be attending their GP because in the one instance, not everybody who attends emergency has a GP.

And number two, we have no linkage to the GP booking system to get an appointment for that patient if they should be with their GP.

True, but sometimes the patients are following the instructions they're given and the instructions that can be given in some of the relevant hospital clinics themselves are, if you have a problem, come back to the emergency department.

So they may be in a cardiology clinic or a gastroenterology clinic or have just recently been discharged post-surgery.

and be told, if you have an issue, come back to the emergency department, rather than contacting that individual team directly.

And that also leads to frustrations, because the patients rightly believe that that team are sitting there waiting for them to arrive, and

When we're in the emergency department and we get somebody with quite a complicated medical history who's got particular medications which have potential side effects and you're looking to contact the relevant team to go, oh, well, we're not available to come and see the patient.