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

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.

“We have nice facilities here for day-patients, but we don’t have proper facilities for in-patients,” he says. “We’ve been trying to build a new children’s hospital here for years, and we’re potentially much closer now than we were.

“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. They are repurposed adult wards that have had a bit of paint, a few pictures put up, but they’re old wards.”

Dr Mullane says that is the reason he and his colleagues are striving to build a new paediatric hospital, and the hope is that a planning application for a 78-bed unit on the CUH campus will be lodged before Christmas, with each room fully en-suite, allowing isolation areas for patients with infections.

He adds that an important feature of the proposed new facility would be sleeping space for parents of sick children.

“Currently, most parents sleep on a plastic chair, or rather, they try and sleep on a plastic chair beside their child’s hospital bed, which is horrible. These wards will have pull-down beds for parents to sleep on.

“They’ll be modern, big rooms, which none of the current rooms are, and the proposed new facility will also deliver four paediatric operating theatres.” Currently, some 5,000 children have operations in Cork every year, and those procedures occur in adult operating theatres, something Dr Mullane says is always done very well, but not, he says, in a very child-friendly fashion.

As well as what he calls the day job of being a consultant paediatrician specialising in respiratory illnesses, he is also one of six clinical directors in CUH, responsible, as he puts it, for “over 30 doctors, about 120 nurses 20 or 30 health and social care professionals, physiotherapists, dieticians, speech and language therapists, as well as allied health specialists”.

His department also works closely with the paediatric emergency and paediatric surgery departments.

Originally from Charleville, Dr Mullane studied medicine in UCC and did most of his paediatric training, “five, six years” in Dublin, before moving to Australia for three years on a respiratory fellowship. Then, as he puts it, his current job came up back in Ireland.

“We had two young kids at that stage, and both of our families and parents are in the Cork area, so it was an attraction then to jump at that, so we have no regrets.

He says this time of year is always very busy for his department, with lots of respiratory viruses circulating and children sick with coughs and chest infections.

He says the vast majority of illnesses they see are not Covid, but most have exactly the same symptoms, which causes significant challenges.

The department deals with children from, potentially, two days old up to 16 years of age, and he says that the best part of his job is that children, tend to recover very quickly. Dr Mullane offers the example of two children admitted the previous weekend with very serious cases of bronchiolitis, both “teetering on needing to go to intensive care units” and, both children were discharged from hospital within five days.

The corollary of that, he says, is the thankfully rare cases where sick children do not recover from serious illnesses. “It comes with the territory, unfortunately, and a few times a year, you’re on call the weekend and a child gets bought into the emergency department with something, with a trauma, with some severe infection, whatever it is, and they might not survive, and then you’re having to break that news.

“I have three of my own kids, and I’ve been standing there having to tell parents that unfortunately, their child has died from something. And, especially, if the child is the same age as your own, you know, it’s very hard not to be emotionally drawn into that.

“You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t emotionally upset by that.”

He says his hope for the future is that CUH will get the purpose-built, new build 21st-century children’s hospital Munster deserves, and children and parents alike will be afforded the dignity and respect that is their right as Irish citizens.

“All of the children coming here will continue to come here,” he says, “and they deserve the same standards and facilities enjoyed by everyone else in the country.”