Children’s hospital group gives fullest backing to new site
THE three existing children’s hospitals have welcomed ‘wholeheartedly’ the lodging of planning permission for their proposed € 650million replacement.
The planning application for the project – which will see Tallaght, Crumlin and Temple Street children’s hospitals merged on one site – was lodged this week.
But three groups opposed to building the project on the St James’s Hospital campus – including the Jack and Jill Foundation – have pledged to fight the proposed project.
The Children’s Hospital Group – an umbrella group for the three existing hospitals – insisted yesterday that the project provides the opportunity to give the children of Ireland the ‘best care they can be afforded’.
Nine key members of the group wrote a letter in support of the project which was published in the Irish Times yesterday. They included the director of nursing at the National Children’s Hospital in Tallaght, Marian Connolly, the group clinical director, Dr Peter Greally, and director of nursing at Temple Street Children’s Hospital, Gráinne Bauer. They described the lodging of planning permission f or the project as a ‘hugely positive and important milestone’.
The three existing Dublin paediatric hospitals have been working together as the Children’s Hospital Group on the model of care the new hospital will provide. ‘The new children’s hospital will be at the centre of his new model of care. It will bring all of the most complex elements of modern paediatric care under one roof for the first time in Ireland’s history in a modern building that is custom-built to deliver the best medical treatments that are now available,’ the letter stated.
They said the location of the children’s hospital on a shared campus with St James’s Hospital and a planned new maternity hospital ‘will provide the optimal care for the sickest children, newborn infants and women’.
‘It will improve clinical outcomes, patient experience and reduce waiting times. When the new children’s hospital is built there will be no more unnecessary replication of highly specialised services for children,’ they said.
They claim the ‘new model of care’ will ensure proper referral pathways for all the children or Ireland to access the care appropriate to their needs, either close to their home or if very specialised care is required, then at the new children’s hospital.
They said two satellite centres planned at Tallaght Hospital and Connolly Hospital is an integral part of the project. ‘These centres will provide urgent care to the children of Dublin and surrounding counties as well as paediatric outpatients. These centres will allow children with minor injuries and minor illnesses to be treated locally in a model of care which has proven to be of the highest standard in other locations around the world,’ the letter said.
The new facility was first recommended 22 years ago but has been dogged by controversy. Plans to build the hospital on a site at the Mater collapsed three years ago when the planning board refused to give i t the go ahead.
The St James’s Hospital site was selected as an alternative. But residents living in its vicinity, the Jack and Jill Foundation, and the New Children’s Hospital Alliance have all confirmed they are going to object to the plans.
Both the Jack and Jill Foundation and the NCHA want to see it built on a greenfield site at Connolly Hospital.
The Health Minister has warned that each year of delay to the project would add up to €70million annually because of construction inflations. But Jack and Jill founder Jonathan Irwin said the charity would have a ‘whole team’ opposing plans for the hospital.
Retired emergency medicine consultant Dr Róisín Healy said there was a ‘zero’ chance of building work beginning by spring, predicting a repeat of the €40million debacle when the planning board refused permission to build the hospital on a site at the Mater.
Dr Healy, part of the New Children’s Hospital Alliance, said the group would ‘absolutely’ object to the plans, on a ‘children’s rights platform’.
‘Urgent care for children’