HSE ‘only canvassed doctors in Dublin’

PAEDIATRICIANS at some of the State’s largest hospitals outside Dublin have condemned the Health Service Executive (HSE) for failing to include them in the consultation process for a new national children’s hospital.

Professor Jonathan Hourihane, head of paediatrics at University College Cork (UCC) and chairman of the paediatrics division at Cork University Hospital (CUH) said there was no consideration for the rest of the country when the decision was taken.

“They have not canvassed paediatricians outside of Dublin, instead they sought the views of the hospitals involved and those of international experts.”

This was despite the fact that up to 70% of children treated in Dublin’s children’s hospitals are referred from other parts of the country. Nor had the HSE approached the Royal College of Physicians (RCPI) Faculty of Paediatrics about the training requirements of doctors working at the new hospital, Prof Hourihane said.

Both Prof Hourihane and Dr David Lillis, consultant paediatrician at University College Hospital Galway (UCHG), criticised the speed at which the consultation process was carried out.

“My own feeling is that the whole process seems to have been put together with undue haste.

“Expediency was the prime concern. It would seem to me it was carried out without taking into account the sensitivities of vested interests — consultants, nursing staff and administrators,” Dr Lillis said.

Dr Lillis is a former president of the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association.

Both doctors described as a “red herring” the argument that the new hospital needed to be co-located with an adult hospital. It was far more important to co-locate with a maternity hospital, they said.

Prof Hourihane said the McKinsey report, which recommended a single tertiary paediatric hospital for the State, had cited easy access and room for expansion among its key criteria in the selection of a suitable site. He said the selected site — the Mater Hospital — did not meet either of these requirements.

Both paediatricians agreed with the report’s recommendation that a single tertiary children’s hospital is the best option, bringing together the three children’s hospitals in Dublin.

“The need is so critical, that to have a consultation process which is so fatally flawed is a tragedy,” Prof Hourihane said.

The HSE has already stated it intended to go ahead with the new hospital at the Mater site, despite the decision by Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin to withdraw from the process.

“We could be waiting another 30 years for consensus as we’ve seen in other areas involving amalgamation,” the spokesman said.

He also said the National Children’s Hospital in Tallaght had not formally disengaged from the process, despite reports to the contrary. He said paediatricians around the country could “get involved” in the design process of the new hospital.

The RCPI’s Faculty of Paediatrics would also be involved, he said.