Mallow hospital’s €5m medical assessment unit will open next week
A €5 million Medical Assessment Unit will be open to patients at Mallow General Hospital in Co Cork from Monday next. The unit will be manned by newly appointed physicians.
It will operate on weekdays but will also by available to patients at weekends if they are referred for assessment by a GP.
There is no medical assessment service available at Cork University Hospital on Saturdays and Sundays.
The unit will be housed on the ground floor of the hospital extension. In seven weeks’ time, the first floor will also be opened and it will provide a new day procedures ward along with a state of the art endoscopy unit — put into the hospital at the request of the health services watchdog HIQA.
Mallow-based Cllr Noel O’Connor, mayor of Cork County, said the new unit was the culmination of the reorganising of services at the hospital which got under way last March.
“There was, at that stage, the move to transfer the emergency department and acute surgery to Cork University Hospital.
“Along with these changes some day surgery procedures began to transfer to Mallow General Hospital from CUH,” he said.
“This has proved most successful from the patients’ point of view. Some patients who had been on waiting lists for over a year for the CUH, were attended to in Mallow General Hospital.”
He said the recent establishment of a Local Injuries Unit (LIU) at the hospital was also very effective and patients were, on average, being dealt with in the space of an hour.
“I know of many people who... are most pleasantly surprised with the efficiency of this service and the short time it takes to be seen there,” he added.
