Who will govern national children’s hospital?

There is one key factor to be considered in coming to a resolution of the new national children’s hospital debacle and that is: Who will own and govern the new hospital?

All the potential adult teaching hospital sites identified in Dublin, bar St. James, are Catholic Church-controlled. In the run-up to the centenary of the founding of the “Republic” we should end the practice of delivering essential health and education services via church-controlled institutions. Hospitals under Catholic Church ownership and control have interfering medical ethics’ committees under what we can term ‘Rome rule’. These shadowy and unaccountable committees have the power to dictate which medical treatments, interventions or procedures can or cannot be undertaken in such hospitals, and is the cause of pregnant patients’ physicians sending them to ‘safe’ hospitals, like the Rotunda.

The new children’s hospital has to be under secular, public control, either on a green-field site or near St. James’ Hospital. Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly told the MacGill Summer School (Jul 2011) that the new hospital would be in public ownership and control. He should say that again in the Dáil and make it clear that all legal medical procedures will be permitted.