Downgrading Waterford’s hospital ‘will cost lives’

Plans to downgrade services at one of the country’s busiest regional hospitals have been called “reckless”.

Following reports that an expert group is to recommend the break-up of the South-East Hospital Network, with some services moving from Waterford Regional Hospital to Cork, Sinn Féin senator David Cullinane yesterday said such a move “will cost lives”.

The move is said to be part of a recommendation made to Health Minister James Reilly by a group chaired by John Higgins of UCC.

The report backs linking WRH and South Tipperary General Hospital with acute hospitals in Cork, and aligning Wexford General Hospital and St Luke’s General Hospital, Kilkenny, with counterparts in Dublin.

However, Mr Cullinane said yesterday any such decision should be fought “tooth and nail”. He said the break-up of the South-East Hospital Network will see the “wholesale destruction” of services at WRH and lead to a significant loss of jobs in the region.

“Plans to downgrade Waterford Regional Hospital are reckless and dangerous,” said Mr Cullinane. “It will affect patients from across the south-east. Vital services such as trauma, cancer care and cardiology, will be decimated, if not lost altogether.

“In such a scenario, patients from Waterford and South Tipperary would have to travel to Cork, and patients from Wexford and Kilkenny would have to travel to Dublin.

“This could cost lives, as the critical intervention times for certain treatments may not be met,” he said.

Waterford deputy mayor, Labour’s Jack Walsh, said the south-east has a population of more than 497,000, adding that “this vast number of people” cannot be left dependent on “large and often already overcrowded Dublin and Cork hospitals” for vital health services.

“What is needed is a properly constituted and structured South-East Hospital Group,” he said.