‘Bizarre’ child hospital project should be cancelled before another euro is spent

PLANNING permission for a Beacon private children’s hospital is to be welcomed.

It will take a small number of better-off children out of the public system. Also it pulls a stone out of the myth of a coherent, equitable national policy for children’s hospital healthcare.

Nobody involved in this area opposes the principle of rationalisation. It is the specific implementation proposals (particularly in relation to the single-campus Mater Hospital site ‘solution’) that raise serious questions.