A child-focused hospital: why we need a purpose-built paediatric hospital in Munster

'We have tripled our number of wards over in the last five, six, years, but those are wards which aren’t designed to cater for the needs of children'

Dr David Mullane: Currently, some 5,000 children have operations in Cork every year, and those procedures occur in adult operating theatres. Picture: David Keane.

“The hope is that in five years’ time we will be working out of a new, specially built, fit-for-purpose paediatric hospital in Cork that has all the facilities to deal with the care needs of children, not just in Cork, but in the wider surrounding counties that we already manage anyway,” says David Mullane, a consultant paediatrician and clinical director at Cork University Hospital (CUH).

Dr Mullane has been a consultant paediatrician at CUH for almost 13 years, and, in that time, he has been part of a project group working to establish the hospital as a regional centre for paediatrics, caring for patients from across Munster and sometimes beyond.