Martin: CUH project not sustainable

AS HEALTH Minister Mary Harney prepares to sign off on the first hospital co-location contracts this week, her cabinet colleague Micheál Martin has once again insisted the Cork project is not “sustainable”.

Ms Harney and the Beacon Medical Group will finalise the contracts for the private hospitals in the grounds of Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, Limerick Regional Hospital and Cork University Hospital.

However, the plans for Cork have not gone down well with Mr Martin who has written to Cork City Council’s planning director about the €250 million project. In his letter, he claims local residents are “extremely concerned” about the development of the 185-bed hospital because it will undermine their privacy and reduce their access to light. In addition, he questioned whether traffic management in the area could take both the hospital and the Cork Institute of Technology and University College Cork campus expansions.

Earlier this month, speaking in his native city, he said he fully supported the Government’s policy of building private hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals but added the Beacon Medical Group’s plans were not sustainable in a corner of the crowded CUH campus.

“The size of that project, in my view, in the absence of a masterplan for the hospital, which is provided for in the Bishopstown and Wilton area action plan, and the absence of a mobility plan, is not sustainable on that site,” he said.

To date, Cork City Council has received 144 submissions on the project from members of the public and local politicians including Ciarán Lynch of the Labour Party and Dan Boyle of the Green Party.

On Friday it emerged senior doctors and management at Cork’s hospitals were at odds over the plans for the private co-located hospital.

Paul Sweeney, chair of the consultant medical board at Mercy University Hospital and Dr Neil O’Donovan, chair of the consultant medical board at South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital, said the concentration of private and public medical infrastructure on the site of CUH would not produce optimal care for the people of Cork and Munster and would re-enforce a two-tier system.

That is at odds with CUH, which has said without the development of the private hospital it will not be possible to serve the people of the southern region optimally in terms of acute hospital-based healthcare delivery.