Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 23 October 2014
Public Accounts Committee
2012 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
2012 Accounts of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board
11:20 am
Mr. John Pollock:
It is both. Regarding the internal workings of how it is going to work, one must look at the manpower resourcing of the new hospital also. In looking at that when one merges three hospitals into one, one will look for efficiencies in terms of how the hospital is staffed and in terms of procurement of consumables, materials and drugs with greater buying power. One is looking at how the hospital will be run. However, one must also tell the design team how large a hospital it must design. We have told our design team the hospital will be approximately 65,000 sq. m of net clinical space. That is purely clinical space and when one grosses it all up for communications and circulation, one ends up with a gross hospital space of approximately 110,000 sq. m. We must provide this information to the design team in advance. It is design information we provide to the BDP team in terms of saying to it that is the hospital we want it to design. It is very similar to what was planned at the Mater in terms of scale and when one moves to a new site there will be some synergies in terms of what can be shared on the St. James's campus that will be different to what might have been shared at the Mater. One conducts a stress test to bring it up to current medical practice and to accommodate it at St. James's.