Dr. Finn Breathnach:

There are a lot of people who have remained silent and will remain anonymous, yet they have expressed their concerns to us. We have received an e-mail from a consultant in St. James's Hospital which highlights an article I read recently in The Irish Timeson staffing. According to Eilish Hardiman, 600 staff will need to be recruited for the children's hospital. She has suggested affordable housing should be built for them. The consultant in question wrote that staff were exiting St. James's Hospital in droves and that they did not want to work there. The consultant said eight cardiothoracic intensive care nurses and seven radiographers had just left and that half of the staff in another department had applied for other jobs. Nurses are arriving one hour before their shift starts just to get a parking space and the parking problem will get worse. I made a telephone call to one of my former senior nurses in the oncology-haematology department in Crumlin hospital. I cannot believe that even at this late stage no workforce planning has been done in that department. No one has asked the specialist nurses who are impossible to replace because of a shortage worldwide whether they are willing to work in the children's hospital. Most of the nurses in the three children's hospitals live in a place convenient to them.

None of them will have elected to work the James's site. They require a car. They are fertile, they have children, they drop the child to the crèche, they live in Naas, Newbridge, Kildare, Ashbourne etc. and they drive. If they are not given parking they will leave. There is a great fear that both hospitals will fail.

We received under the freedom of information legislation the report of the expert independent international review of 2011. The author of the report said the ideal location for the children's hospital would be green space, provide for unfettered access, accommodate research and educational activity, provide sufficient space to ensure the aggregation of all patient care services meeting current and future care requirements and be tri-located with an adult tertiary care and a maternity facility. We agree that if there was a site and funding for such an aspirational location it would be a magnificent campus. That statement was made before an additional 90 acres was made available for the Blanchardstown site in 2012.