Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes. We are all aware of the cancellation of elective procedures in the three children's hospitals at the moment and I will outline one of my concerns. The new children's hospital is not providing many more beds. The figure given to the committee before was that there would be an extra ten beds or something but that is very few. I have a real concern that when this beautiful new facility is opened, because we do not have any more beds but a growing population the ratio of beds to children may go down. In other words, the next time there is a virus outbreak, the emergency department will fill up and, again, the new children's hospital would have to start cancelling elective procedures, which would be a disaster. One way that this is being dealt with in modern hospital design is to physically separate elective and non-elective care so that when the emergency department must deal with an emergency, a major trauma incident or the outbreak of a virus that the elective and non-elective work is separate.

At Tallaght Hospital, the elective facilities that are being built are physically separate from non-elective facilities. Was there consideration of that issue in the design of the national children's hospital?