Child hospital move will be a catastrophe

SOME of your readers have had occasion to benefit from the services provided by the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), now in Tallaght and formerly in Harcourt Street, Dublin. Also Our Lady’s Hospital in Crumlin.

Surprisingly few realise both these hospitals are to be closed down and replaced by a single skyscraper on a gridlocked site at the Mater Hospital in northside Dublin.

There will be no children’s overnight hospital beds south of the Liffey and no full-scale children’s hospital services. Merely a first-aid post called, grandiloquently, an ‘ambulatory’ centre.

Even the external consultants — who were expressly forbidden to comment on the overall strategy — tried to hint in code that this would not work.

Nobody argues with the principle of ‘rationalisation’ of children’s hospital services — particularly those (like myself in a lay voluntary capacity) who have spent years monitoring those services. And trying desperately to scrape tiny items of equipment and key appointments out of the ‘system’.

However, this saga — as you have gallantly tried to show in numerous articles and reports — will end in a catastrophe.

This is not a Dublin issue — it is a national issue. And the victims will be the heroic professional staff, the parents and, most directly, the children of the nation.

The Tallaght Hospital Action Group is organising a march from the county council offices beside the Square in Tallaght at 1pm today. If your readers have a child or know a child who needs or may need commonsense hospital care, they are invited to be there. And even if they have simply had enough of HSE messing.

The fact that this new e800-to-e900 million gazebo will be sited in the Taoiseach’s constituency should not influence your readers’ objective assessment of the need for a review.

Maurice O’Connell

Forge Park

Oakpark

Tralee

Co Kerry