Dr. Ciara Martin:

I am very happy to say that Connolly has probably exceeded some of our expectations in many of these areas. Last year, when we opened the paediatric outpatient and urgent care centre, we had set out to deliver the model of care, namely, to open an urgent care centre, to have a general paediatric clinic close to home, supported by psychology services, dieticians, multidisciplinary teams and also to have orthopaedic fracture clinics. Those were the core services which we were going to run in Connolly.

This year, because the infrastructure of the building is new and spacious and there are so many single rooms, we were able to develop many services within the CHI at the Connolly campus. We have been able to run additional clinics for which we had not planned but that have supported children's care across all of CHI in Dublin. We are delivering some of the cardiac clinics, pain services and allergy clinics. We have been able to use our radiology department to take some of the pressures off of GP referrals into radiology departments in Crumlin, Temple Street and Tallaght hospitals. All those children were able to come over to Connolly during the time of Covid. They come into our brand new building in a very safe way, have their X-rays and then leave. We are up to a situation where approximately 300 children come in every week for radiology services in Connolly. I think we have exceeded expectation there.

Our urgent care centre operates five days a week now, but our plan is to run it seven days a week. In respect of running it as an urgent care centre, we were hoping to see approximately 70 to 90 children a day. Last winter, before Covid happened, when we had busy accident and emergency departments across the city, within our opening hours of up to 8 p.m., we were already seeing 50 or 60 children a day. We are very happy with that situation. We have also been able to show that our model of care there is working. When children and their families come in the door, they are seen by a clinician and triaged within 15 minutes. Since the day we opened, more than 95% of our children have been seen within 15 minutes of arrival. Their length of stay with us has come down from about three hours to approximately one and a half.