Last May, the minister for health Mary Harney said reports about costcutting in the HSE were "totally inaccurate". In fact, she said, there would be "substantially more staff" working in front line health services by the end of the year. By September, this assurance was brushed under the carpet with the HSE announcement that it had to enforce a "temporary recruitment ban" to reduce its 230m deficit.

Harney then insisted the cutbacks would have no effect on how patients were treated.

In response to this, and the recent revelation that the "temporary cutbacks" are due to last until the end of the year, the Irish Medical Organisation set up a dedicated email address . . .

cutbacks@imo. ie . . . and urged doctors to contact them with information about the effects of the spending freeze.

After just two weeks, over 100 complaints have flooded in from hospitals all over the country. "The general feedback is that things are already very bad and they're only going to get worse in the winter months, " a spokeswoman for the IMO told the Sunday Tribune.

"There's a knock-on effect in a lot of areas. For example, because the homecare funding has been cut, there are a lot of elderly patients who are finished their medical treatment but can't leave the hospital because they still need a certain amount of care. That means they're taking up hospital beds, which in turn means more incoming patients on trolleys. In St James's Hospital in Dublin, they've already had a threefold increase of patients on trolleys . . . and it's just going to get worse."

The Sunday Tribune has obtained the list that has been compiled by the IMO. Here are some of the scenarios with which staff are struggling at the front line of the health service.