Quality of care is what matters – not location or politics

AMID all the politicking surrounding the proposed new National Children’s Hospital may be we’ve lost sight of the endgame: that there are parents around the country for whom quality of care is the only relevant concern.

These are the thousands of parents whose lives are shaped by hospital wards; whose children require frequent or constant specialised care and who would travel to the ends of the earth and back if it meant only the most miniscule improvement in the quality of life of their sick child.

For parents such as these, the location of a new National Children’s Hospital is not a deal breaker; what matters most is the skill and expertise of the people who work inside.

What the proposed new hospital offers is a state-of-the-art world-class paediatric facility which has the support of the country’s existing children’s hospitals, albeit it took considerable convincing to get the Adelaide and Meath National Children’s Hospital in Tallaght and Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin on side.

Significantly, it also has the support of the Faculty of Paediatrics, of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI), a body representative of consultant paediatricians who are actively engaged in the care of children in hospitals around the country. This includes all the paediatrics professors in Ireland as well as the consultant paediatric staff engaged in teaching and research.

All have extensive experience and senior paediatric qualifications and their remit is to promote the interests of children in Ireland both in health and disease. As far back as 1993 the faculty recommended a single tertiary-care hospital for children located on an adult hospital site. For the past number of years the board of the faculty has been emphasising the importance of this project proceeding without further delay.

The development of the hospital has already been held up and its ETA is now 2015, three years later than originally planned. It has been dogged by argument about site selection but Mary Harney has ploughed ahead.

“My overriding and sole interest, and that of the Government, is to achieve world-class paediatric services in a signal national tertiary paediatric hospital as soon as possible. This is the best solution for sick children throughout the country and we cannot be distracted from that goal,” she said in January 2007.

There has been plenty of distraction since, most recently the forced resignation of Philip Lynch, the chairman of the board set up to drive the children’s hospital project.

Ms Harney said she asked him to step down when he departed from the mandate he’d been given and opted to talk with businessman Noel Smyth about his offer of a greenfield site. This was an offer the Government rejected as far back as 2006, when it announced in June of that year that it “strongly endorsed” the selection of the Mater campus as the site for the proposed new paediatric hospital.It acknowledged that it had received proposals from a number of property developers and site owners, none of which satisfied the key requirement of co-location with an adult academic teaching hospital.

In this context, it’s a little late in the day to re-visit one of those offers when €5m or €6m has already been spent getting the project to planning and design stage. And, given the precarious state of our finances, we should be mindful of the advice that he who hesitates is lost.

Of course, there are worries about funding, but both Ms Harney and Taoiseach Brian Cowen insist provision has been made, albeit, €110m is dependant on fundraising and philanthropic contributions.

On the upside, the building cost has dropped by about €200m thanks to the change in the fortunes of the construction industry.

On the downside, there is still widespread concern that the Mater is the wrong site, particularly because of the challenges it presents to parents trying to access a city centre hospital with a sick child. But where there is universal agreement is on the need for a new paediatric hospital.

Last week, the dream came closer to reality when a miniature model of what is proposed was finally unveiled.

For thousands of parents it was the first tangible sign of what future hospital visits may hold: a centre-of-excellence where the finest paediatric minds administer quality expert care to sick kids, at a stone’s throw from an adult hospital hosting more fine minds and additional expertise, and wards where desperate parents no longer sleep on the floor by their sick child’s bed but are comfortably and deservedly catered for at a time in their lives when every little counts.

These are lives often tempered by tragedy. It would be a terrible tragedy if politicking and power struggles prevented this hospital from going ahead.