CUH consultants back co-located plan

CONSULTANTS at Cork University Hospital (CUH) united yesterday to back controversial plans for a private co-located hospital on the CUH campus.

A letter from Dr Denis Kelly, the chairman of the Consultant Medical Staff at CUH, was read into the record on day two of the Bord Pleanála oral hearing into the Beacon Medical Group’s (BMG) plans to build a €250 million 175-bed private hospital at CUH.

The letter said the consultants want to support “in the strongest terms” the development of the co-located hospital.

Without such a development, it will not be possible to service the people of the south “optimally” in terms of acute hospital-based healthcare, they said.

The letter outlined five reasons why the consultants support BMG’s project. They said:

n The healthcare currently provided by CUH is limited by infrastructural capacity and developing a co-located hospital is the best way to address this.

nIt will have knock-on benefits to patients in terms of improvements in delivery of services and the recruitment and retention of first class health staff.

n BMG’s project supports academic activity at CUH.

nThe National Cancer Control Programme has identified CUH as the cancer centre for the greater Cork area, with plans to transfer cancer services from other Cork hospitals to CUH over the coming years. This will inevitably result in the need for greater infrastructural capacity.

No viable alternative to a co-located development exists, if the quality of healthcare is to be maintained and improved.

“A delay will undermine the Government’s attempts to develop a nationally coherent, patient-centred healthcare service,” it said.

“The likely development of independent private hospitals to meet the capacity need will render patients more vulnerable to a ‘cherry picking’ approach to service delivery and an inequitable two-tier healthcare system,” it said.