Building children’s hospital elsewhere could save €86m, report finds

BUILDING a national children’s hospital at a site other than the Mater could cut development costs by up to €86 million, a new report has found.

However, the delay caused by a change of venue and the write-off of monies already spent at the Mater meant negligible savings.

A review group which looked at the cost differential between building the hospital at the Mater or one of three alternative Dublin sites found switching the project at this stage would delay it by two-and-a-half years.

This would mean:

* Substantive additional costs of up to €28 million due to price inflation based on the ECB target inflation rate of 2% per annum.

* The loss of €26 million in potential revenue savings through consolidation of the three existing children’s hospitals.

In addition the review panel, chaired by John Cooper, of John Cooper Architecture, a UK health care architect, and carried out under the auspices of the European Health Property Network (EuHPN), found switching to another site would mean writing off €24 million already spent on the Mater site.

Taken together, the loss caused by the delay and the cost of aborting the existing project meant a change of site would not significantly reduce the development costs of the National Paediatric Hospital, the review group concluded.

“If the non-recoverable costs and the lost opportunity of revenue savings are taken into account there is very little difference between the costs of developing the [Mater site] and the competitor sites and therefore no reason to incur the risk of delaying the project for two and a half years,” the review group found.

To further support their findings, the group found just one fifth of the work carried out at the Mater site was transferable to any of the three alternative sites (selected by the Health Service Executive, no land values given) which included a greenfield site previously offered by property developer Noel Smyth at Newlands Cross; a brownfield site not in use in private ownership adjacent to Tallaght hospital and a greenfield site in public ownership beside Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown.. The Mater also had the advantage of being co-located with an adult hospital, creating further cost savings, the group said.

In terms of access and parking, controversial at the Mater site, the review group found all three comparator sites would require significant amendments to be made to the surrounding road infrastructure to accommodate the resulting additional traffic.

In relation to parking, the group conceded the four storey deep underground parking proposed for Eccles St would be costly but that, with 1,000 spaces, it should accommodate both patients and staff because the Mater had been “very successful in reducing the numbers of its staff which use private transport to 30% of total staff numbers”. The other sites would have required up to 1,650 parking spaces to accommodate patients and staff.

The review panel concluded that the overall cost of developing the new hospital on the comparator sites was very similar to Eccles St — ranging from between 92% to 96% of the total costs of the current proposals. At the moment the project is expected to go out to tender in February 2012.