Enough talking: We need to start work on new children’s hospital
We talk a lot about the wasted opportunities of the boom, but this one ranks top of the list in terms of the conditions that our children continue to be treated in when they need to attend a paediatric hospital.
We managed to build a magnificent national conference centre, a marvellous motorway network, a ridiculous amount of houses — but we failed to build an adequate national facility which our children could use when they are at their most vulnerable.
Perversely the fact that this project was kept alive during the recession, when so many others were abandoned due to financial constraints, shows the acute need we have for such a facility.
We need to stop talking. The bottom line is that we need to build, build, build, and quickly. We could discuss the pros and cons of the site at St James’s Hospital versus others, for a further 20 years. What we need now is to see planning permission, hard hats, cranes, and a big building site, and we need them all as fast as possible.
This week, Health Minister Leo Varadkar said Ireland’s children deserve a world-class hospital. “We’ve been promising it, and talking about it, for too long. Let’s get building,” he said at the event to mark the appointment of the design team for the planned new hospital at the St James’s site in Dublin.
There must be a file in the Department of Health with stock phrases such as this, one for each new minister to choose, and to apply to the occasion of our so far pie-in-the-sky children’s hospital.
Of course at the same time as the minister was injecting enthusiasm and vigour to the €650m project, we learn it has experienced yet another delay, and will not now open its doors until spring 2019. We had been told it would be a year earlier.
The design team intend to submit a planning application next June, instead of February, as had been the original plan. The project still has to get planning permission.
There is so much history with this overall hospital project that it has been a disaster before anything has ever got off the ground. Such are the intricacies that it could legitimately be a topic on Mastermind, because you would need to be an expert to have kept up with the various sites, scenarios, personas, and false starts.
There’s been more politics, national and religious, not to mention the particularly vicious medical kind, than you would find in a clatter of general election campaigns. Sandwiched in the middle have been the parents and their sick children. There’s the €40m wasted on developing the site at the Mater Hospital, in the constituency of former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. There have been anonymous letters (the latest published in recent days from an unnamed consultant at St James’), splinter groups, offers of greenfield sites, mysterious philantrophists offering millions, and dire warnings about the consequence of choosing one site over another.
There has also been very genuine people such as Jonathon Irwin, founder and CEO of the Jack and Jill Foundation, who have genuine concerns about the St James’s site, concerns that have been echoed by James Sheehan co-founder of the Blackrock, Galway, and Hermitage Clinics.
On the plus side, the St James’s site is more than three times the area than was allocated at the Mater. It does seem the fears surrounding a sewer and other “unmapped” underground services there have been somewhat overstated. We can only hope and expect that lessons, very expensive ones, were learnt from the mistakes at the Mater site. The hospital team insist they will provide adequate parking for patients, families, and visitors to the hospital.
The major issue with the James’s site is access, no matter how much the project team insist it will not be an issue. People with sick children will travel by car to the hospital and getting in and out of this place will be nowhere near as easy as if it were on a greenfield site.
There have been promises that there will be a “retrieval service” for emergency cases which is due to begin later this year. As part of that, an ambulance would meet parents at an agreed point outside the city centre and rush them to the hospital, thus avoiding traffic jams.
It’s at this point that you do feel that we are veering off into the realms of fantasy. I wrote not so long ago about having to attend the accident and emergency department in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin with my daughter. Luckily it turned out to be something non-serious, and I was very conscious of how near we live to the hospital and how lucky that makes us. But I was also appalled at the state of the place, making the point that toilets in a Burger King would be shut by the health and safety authorities if they were in that sort of structural condition. Needless to say the care was excellent and I was awestruck that the staff could continue to give such good and attentive care while working in such awful conditions.
I was recalling recently with a friend the traumatic experience she had in 2011 when driving her then small baby to Crumlin, on the night there was very bad flooding in the city. Being familiar with that part of Dublin, I was able to guide her through her stressful journey, suggesting alternative routes when she came up against a road that had flooded. During our last call, when she was just minutes from the hospital, I warned her that when she got there she would still have a distance to travel across the hospital campus to A&E. I was particularly conscious that it was night time, lashing rain, and that she had a baby chair containing a very sick baby to carry. The positive news, I told her, was that she should be able to get a parking space, unlike during the day when the carpark was often full. I added that from memory there was no great signposting of the various departments, let alone being able to see them on such a horrible night.
She eventually got there. Her child, who was subsequently transferred to Tallaght, spent 10 days in hospital. She was very ill with a respiratory virus but received excellent care.
My point being that if even the basics, such as signposting and accessibility, are not available in Crumlin, how are we suddenly to trust that something like this ambulance service will be there, almost by magic, at an appointed place to meet panicked parents with a sick child somewhere on the outskirts of Dublin? Even if established successfully would this service survive another recession?
The shambles that has been our effort to build a national children’s hospital to date, has engendered a deep cynicism. But what we have to do now is swallow our doubts, and row in behind this project. We have to put our trust in the State to build this hospital; hope that it gets planning permission, and is finished as quickly as possible.
The main opposition parties are supportive of this particular site. This is the horse we need to back now.
What we have to do now is swallow our doubts and row in behind this project
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