Half of A&E patients are now being forced to wait 12 hours for emergency treatment, a shocking new report has claimed.

An internal HSE report hasshown that 6,159 patients wereleft waiting over 12 hours during the first four months of 2008.

More than two years after Health Minister Mary Harney described A&E overcrowding as a “national emergency”, the report confirmed that the crisis is worsening.

According to the latest worrying statistics, the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for treatment between January and April this year rose by 1,360 compared to the same period in 2007.

This is despite an official HSE report in June 2007, which said that no patient should be forced to endure waiting times of morethan 12 hours at any A&E in the country.

Worst of all, the number of cases where patients at A&E units throughout the country had to wait in excess of 24 hours for admission has also increased from 786 between January and April 2007 to a shocking 1,185 in the first four months of this year

"Hospitals with little or no admission waits continue to experience the same pattern but major centres with large numbers of admission waits have experienced increased numbers awaiting admission," confirmed the report.

"Many hospitals have experienced sharp increases in levels of presentations this year compared to last -- for example all (of the) south-eastern hospitals group.

Increases

"Hospitals such as the South Tipperary, Wexford, Mater, Ennis, Mullingar, Portlaoise, and Tullamore have seen significant increases in the number of patients requiring emergency admissions," it read.

According to the internal HSE report, which is based on a census taken at 2pm in hospital A&Es every day, the number of patients waiting for emergency unit treatment has risen from a monthly average of 3,120 in April 2007 to a massive 3,690 just one year later.

The internal report also noted that the number of patients in A&E increased by 5pc compared to the same period in 2007 -- signalling that patients are failing to take up HSE recommendations to stay away from A&E units unless it is a genuine emergency.

The latest crisis to hit Ireland's A&Es -- and the patients and medics dependent on them -- comes over two years since Health Minister Mary Harney described A&E overcrowding as a "national emergency".

As a result of the comment -- which came on the back of a Prime Time expose on national A&E standards -- the minister called for an official report into the crisis.

Despite being drawn up and sent to the HSE in December 2006, this damning report -- which claimed that a series of A&Es were "unfit for purpose" -- was not published until early June 2007, a week after the General Election.

And hitting out at the alleged lack of progress in implementing its reforms, the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM) last month claimed that seven of the countries A&Es remain unfit for purpose a year after they were exposed in the report.

These include the Mater and Beaumont in Dublin, the Mercy in Cork, as well as emergency departments in Drogheda, Letterkenny, Cavan and Wexford.

- Fiachra O'Cionnaith