Royal Victoria Hospital: Woman dies on A&E trolley while awaiting admission

An elderly woman who had been waiting several hours to be admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital died while lying on a trolley in its Emergency Department.

BBC News NI understands the woman, who was 77 years old, had been brought by ambulance from a nursing home on Friday night.

Sources have described the department as overcrowded and extremely noisy.

The Belfast Health Trust has passed on its condolences to the woman's family.

The trust's medical director Chris Hagan said at times there were 50 to 60 patients waiting for an emergency department bed over the weekend.

"Our thoughts are with the lady's family and obviously we will look into this further," he told BBC News NI.

"But sometimes patients do pass away in our emergency department.

"The emergency department on Saturday and Sunday was exceptionally busy with huge numbers of attendances - 50 to 60 patients were waiting for a bed so sometimes patients will be on trolleys.

"Of course in an ideal situation, if a patient is end-of-life we would want them to be in a room on their own with their family around them, but you have to understand the current pressure that the system is under, sometimes the care that we provide would not be exactly what we want."

The woman was then brought into the resuscitation area.

It is understood the woman was surrounded by other patients on trolleys when nursing staff realised she had died.

Her family and the nursing home were informed of the death by telephone.

Staff who worked at the weekend said it was among the busiest, with very sick and elderly people waiting on trolleys to be admitted.

There were not enough available beds to cope with the demand.

Dr Hagan told BBC News NI it had been a difficult weekend for the emergency department.

"We were already under a lot of pressure on our emergency department this weekend with the number of patients who required admission without allocated beds and we'd been helping Northern Trust throughout the weekend," he added

"And then, unfortunately, the Northern Trust then declared a major incident, so that put even further pressure on us.

"Our emergency department is overcrowded and that represents a safety issue in itself.

"And we have been doing lots of things over the past number of months to try and reduce that overcrowding, we are taking extra patients up on to wards above the number of beds that there actually are."

The medical director said Northern Ireland needed a functioning executive.

"This is a regional issue about how crowded our emergency departments are, about the problem of delayed discharges from hospital and undoubtedly a functioning executive having oversight of that and supporting departmental colleagues is really important, particularly around budgets," he said.

Dr Hagan said a functioning government was particularly important as the health service was entering "one of the most difficult winters that any of us will have faced".