Professor Robert Landers:

That is a good question. We need to be very careful here and to differentiate between protected elective capacity and elective-only hospitals. The elective-only hospitals is not necessarily a model that the IHCA would support. The current model, as proposed, which is to have three elective hospitals in the country, is flawed. It is not adequate geographically to expect the patients of the country to go to three elective centres in Cork, Dublin and Galway for all elective care. We feel that we would be better off putting protected elective capacity into our major hospital sites across the country. In that way all of the expertise would be on the one site and we would be able to attract and retain a higher quality of staff because of the breadth of service that we would provide.

The other worry among consultants on the ground is that the proposed elective-only hospitals do not have adequate ICU facilities to deal with the higher risk patients. They are still going to have to be looked after in the major hospitals. We strongly feel that we would be better off putting protected elective capacity into our existing centres.