The University of Limerick (UL) has opened a field hospital at its sports arena as part of the university’s ongoing response to the coronavirus pandemic.
RTÉ News reported today that the new 68-bed care facility has been set up in order to ease pressure on the UL Hospital Group’s acute hospital, University Hospital Limerick, which has faced overcrowding problems during the pandemic.
The field hospital will help to manage overcrowding problems in University Hospital Limerick while it awaits the completion of a 60-bed block that is due to open by the end of the year. Some 38 single-bed rooms expected to be ready by late summer.
The new unit will cater for patients who are ready to be discharged from the acute hospital but require recovery or rehabilitation services. Recovering Covid-19 patients who are in need of extra medical care will also be cared for in the facility once they are clear of the infection.
UL Hospital Group CEO Colette Cowan said that the new facility may be needed until November due to the possibility of a second wave of the coronavirus and an expected surge in cases of respiratory illnesses and the flu in the coming months.
The centre has been split into partitioned wards, each housing a nurses’ station, clinical treatment facilities and space for physiotherapy, and has the capacity to expand to 84 beds.
UL president Des Fitzgerald said that he was happy to see the university’s sports arena repurposed as a care facility given that the university would not be able to make use of it for the foreseeable future.
Fitzgerald said that the field hospital also provided an opportunity for training UL medical and healthcare students and offered the university a chance to expand its research efforts.
“There will be patients who have recovered from Covid-19 and this would be the ideal situation to observe their continued recovery from a disease with largely unknown long-term consequences”, he said.
UL’s Covid Action Group has been working with the HSE to open the new field hospital as part of the university’s broader response effort to the coronavirus.
The opening comes just weeks after Fitzgerald announced his decision to resign as the university’s president “in the context of Covid 19”.
In an email sent to UL staff, Fitzgerald said that he was “particularly proud of UL’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, in recognising its gravity early, in rapidly and successfully moving online and in contributing to the fight against the pandemic in our community”.
