Professor Chris Fitzpatrick:

There will always be babies we will not identify beforehand. I refer to the particularly unfortunate circumstances. There are babies born with conditions we have not diagnosed who are remote from Dublin and who have to be transferred to Dublin, and the outcome for those babies would be grave. There are very considerable advantages to being born in Dublin because the distances are short. We have a wonderful neonatal transport team with experts who will stabilise babies and transfer. In terms of bad outcomes during the transfer, they are few or rare. In terms of what happens, the baby goes into the ambulance in one condition and comes out in a different condition. It is not the ideal form of transport. There will be babies born in the Rotunda Hospital who will require transfer to the national maternity hospital, but with increased availability of prenatal scans, we will be looking to minimise the chance of a baby that has a serious abnormality being born in the wrong place. These are not universally diagnosed conditions but it is to maximise the outcome for these babies.

There are very premature babies that we know about because we expect them to be born and they need concentration in intensive care units because they are high risk, having gut surgery, for example. Centralising the services for critically ill babies into one unit will maximise outcomes.