Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 5 December 2019

Public Accounts Committee

National Paediatric Hospital Development Board: Financial Statements 2018

9:00 am

Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

Maybe if I can clarify, this is not just around investing to open up the new services in Connolly, although that is a really important part. This integration is about merging hospitals and we know from national and international experiences that this can be a challenge. Something like 75% of mergers do not achieve success. Very early on, we were working on the process to be commenced as a single organisation, which we have just done this year. A significant amount of investment was to make that happen. When we opened up Connolly it afforded us an opportunity to have, for example, a single, unique identifier for all of the patients in Children's Health Ireland. That means that the patients can go to any of our facilities and the staff can see their records. It is a really important safety issue and also it is a really important matter when we are under pressure. We are now actually moving the patients and the staff around to where the resources are. We have invested-----

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