Call for new hospital to take pressure off crowded CUH

The need for a new hospital in Cork to replace two centuries-old facilities and to take some of the pressure off Cork University Hospital (CUH) remains a key outstanding recommendation of a report on the reconfiguration of acute hospital services, published five years ago.

Yesterday, the advisory board that helped drive the reconfiguration project in Cork and Kerry urged Health Minister Leo Varadkar to make a decision on the location of a new hospital site as soon as possible. The board presented its final reconfiguration report to the minister yesterday.

Mr Varadkar was presented with a shortlist of six possible sites in March. The new hospital would be an elective facility, catering for inpatients, outpatients, day-patients, and walk-in diagnostic services and would take considerable pressure off the crowded CUH campus.

Currently, the annual footfall into Cork City hospitals in terms of outpatient visits is more than 250,000. This is in addition to 90,000 emergency visits. CUH and the Mercy University Hospital are the only remaining 24/7 emergency departments (ED) in the city — Bantry and Mallow hospitals, as well as the South Infirmary Victoria University (SIVUH), closed their EDs under the reconfiguration plan.

Prof John Higgins, who oversaw the reconfiguration project, said they were “not looking for an immediate fix” but one they could “build on incrementally” — that the new hospital could be built in modules over 10 to 15 years.

“It was one of the key recommendations of the Reconfiguration Roadmap (published 2010), which was approved by the Department of Health and signed up to by the HSE and voluntary hospitals. We are not asking for an announcement on a build, we just want a site identified. Ultimately that kind of major capital decision will be a political one,” said Prof Higgins.

The new hospital would ultimately replace MUH and SIVUH, built in 1857 and 1760 respectively.

Prof Higgins said that much had been achieved since the roadmap was launched, including bringing consultants to work in their specialty teams across all the hospitals in Cork and Kerry rather than in one hospital and concentrating complex care in one named hospital for the region rather than each individual hospital delivering small pockets of expert care .

A spokesperson from the Department of Health said the development of a new elective hospital for Cork would be a matter for the South/South West Hospitals Group to consider.

“The HSE would also need to prioritise this proposal in relation to other capital requirements around the country,” they said.

A few stumbling blocks remain however, key among them the slow progress in reconfiguring general surgery. The board, chaired by property developer Michael O’Flynn, said this had dominated the board’s agenda “for the last two years”.

The vision is for all surgeons to sign up to a single, unified, surgical on-call roster for Cork, based at CUH, with a dedicated on-call team, a dedicated surgical assessment unit and a dedicated emergency theatre.

However Prof Higgins said while “no-one was disagreeing with the objective, including hospitals and clinicians”, they had yet to “get to the point where they were happy to proceed”.

“We haven’t yet reached the point where they could be certain they would have the beds, the infrastructure, the theatre time and the access to imaging, but I would be optimistic that as resources come back into the system, that it will all become possible,” he said.